Testing

Tests should keep apps from being flaky. But tests themselves can become flaky—even the most straightforward ones. Here's how we dove into a problematic test on a PostgreSQL-backed Rails app, and what we uncovered.

Test automation engineers continuously research the latest tools and techniques to ensure that their test automation framework stays fast, stable, and easy to use. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Simon Stratton will take a look at some tips that you can use to update your framework for 2019 by improving your use of Selenium Grid, Java’s wait function, and Chrome DevTools.

Dealing with a real database for integration and end-to-end testing can pose some challenges. One way of working around them is to use an in-memory database that integrates well with the testing framework and provides APIs to manipulate its state from test code. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Mikhail Angelov shows how you can write integration and end-to-end tests easily for your Node.js and MongoDB application without having to write complicated setup/teardown code.

Do you think testing your iOS or Android apps manually is faster than writing automated tests for them? Calabash, the cross-platform acceptance framework, busts that myth once and for all. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Alexander Gedevanishvili shows how Calabash, with its support for Cucumber, makes writing automated UI tests as simple as writing instructions in plain English.

In this tutorial, you will learn how automated testing works for the iOS platform and how to implement it in your project.

Your software isn’t fully tested until you write integration tests for it. While unit tests help ensure that functions are properly written, integration tests help ensure that the system is working properly as a whole. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Luka Blažecki uses Node.js to explain why integration testing is important for every development platform and how to write clean, composable integration tests.

When Golang first came out, there were next to no resources available about how to efficiently test your Go-written application. Even now, with plenty of guides and recommendations available, many bright-eyed developers still try to apply their Ruby or JavaScript mindset and use external frameworks to test apps written in Go. In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Gabriel Aszalos first explains Golang philosophy and then covers the basics of testing in Go, from table testing to JSON response assertion.

Would you like to test your PHP code like a boss? Do you feel that basic unit tests and PHPUnit just don't cut it anymore? If your answer to both questions is yes, you might want to try Codeception, a mature and well-documented testing framework designed to outperform PHPUnit and Behat. In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vasily Koval describes how he came to take the plunge and start using Codeception, and he explains why you should check out Codeception for your PHP testing needs.

It's tragically common for developers to come into a project where proper automated testing has been and will continue to be overlooked. It's a situation Freelance Developer Bhushan Lodha has found himself in all too often; fortunately, he's found a solution. In this article, he briefly covers the reasons why testing is overlooked and ultimately explains his "coding life hack" to ensure quality control even when he can't introduce a testing framework.