Best Practices for Testing Vue Applications

Testing is essential for identifying weaknesses or issues in our Vue application before releasing it to consumers. Here are some best practices to keep in mind.

One of the most important phases of the software development lifecycle is software testing, which aids businesses in thoroughly evaluating whether or not their software product satisfies their specifications.

Additionally, software testing plays a vital role in web applications as it helps developers to fix security loopholes, bugs and failed features that may have occurred during the development process. While performing this test, we must follow certain practices and tips to perform the functional test in our application.

This article will cover what testing is, why it is important, the types of testing, and the best practices to follow to perform a fully functional test in our Vue application.

What is Software Testing?

Software testing is a predefined process to ensure our application matches the required outcomes or users’ expectations before consumption.

Software testing’s main goal is to find flaws or vulnerabilities in the program and stop them from being made available to end users. In contrast to the real requirements, software testing can assist in identifying problems such as functional flaws, defects, gaps, code vulnerabilities, performance, scalability issues or missing requirements.

The typical testing procedure is creating the test cases, executing them on our program, and carefully examining the results to find any flaws in our application. The testing process can be manual or automated, or both can be performed, but this depends on the complexity of our software.

Benefits of Testing Our Application

Testing is a crucial aspect of developing our applications as it helps us ensure that they function as intended and are error-free. The following are other benefits of testing:

Reduced Development Cost

Finding and fixing defects early on in the development process is much less expensive than doing it after the product has been released. Early problem detection through testing will help us save time, money and resources.

Better User Experience

Testing our application will also identify performance problems and failed functionalities as its performance reduces when it glitches or becomes slow. This can become frustrating and dissatisfying for the users, leaving them with a poor user experience and a bad impression of our product.

Enhance Application Security

Software testing enables us to find security flaws we overlooked or introduced by the software tools we used to build our application. We can easily address these flaws before the application’s release, which results in enhancing our application security and protecting the users’ data.

Types of Testing in Vue

Vue has different testing types, and each of the testing types plays a different role in detecting issues in our application.

End-to-End Test

This testing involves evaluating the entire software program from beginning to end to ensure that all components are operational and produce the required results. In a form application, for instance, we check for incomplete, incorrect and blank data submissions before allowing the user to submit the data.

End-to-end testing performs all the actions we listed to ensure the application matches the required outcome.

Unit Test

Unit testing is a software testing technique that isolates a single component of a complete application for testing. Unit testing’s main goal is ensuring every component of our software application functions as intended and complies with all design and functional specifications. It also assesses the internal logic and structure of our code.

Integration Test

This type of software testing is typically carried out when more than unit testing is required to assess the compliance of our program’s modules, components or other system parts with the defined functional requirements.

This testing can be carried out while integrating software modules, other systems and hardware/software components.

Performance Test

This kind of testing measures how effectively our application functions under particular circumstances, such as high traffic, excessive load or several concurrent users. It aids in locating performance issues with our application and determining whether it satisfies the necessary performance standards. This test is performed to check the responsiveness and functionalities of our application.

Testing Frameworks and Tools for Vue

As so many testing tools have been made available, it is now quite simple for us to test our applications using them:

Test Studio

Test Studio is a comprehensive testing tool created by Progress Telerik to allow us to automate functional performance and load testing of our web, desktop and mobile applications. For generating and running automated tests, Test Studio offers a robust and user-friendly environment that supports a variety of technologies and platforms. You may quickly integrate into your preferred framework from the list, such as Vue, React, Angular, etc. It streamlines our testing procedure and raises the quality of our applications.

Test Studio is an excellent testing tool because it combines codeless and code-based automation features in an intuitive user interface, enabling testing for all users, regardless of skill, and producing excellent results for managers, developers and quality assurance specialists.

There are three categories of tests that Test Studio provides in our application:

• Functional testing
• API testing
• Load testing

In our next article, we will talk about how to perform a functional test in our Vue application using Test Studio.

JustMock

JustMock is a flexible mocking tool for crafting unit tests from Progress Telerik. JustMock allows you to easily isolate your testing scenario and so you can focus on the logic you want to verify. It integrates seamlessly with your favorite unit testing framework and makes unit testing and mocking simple and fast.

Test Studio and JustMock are both available under the Telerik DevCraft license, which also provides access to Progress Telerik’s well-known .NET and JavaScript UI component libraries. All of them offer a free trial.

Jest

Jest is a JavaScript testing framework developed by Facebook (Meta) to guarantee that we can write tests using a straightforward, well-known API packed with features that provide results rapidly. Although Jest has strong documentation and just needs a minimal amount of configuration, it can be customized to meet our needs. Because of its simple setup, it makes testing enjoyable, and we can incorporate it into our projects.

Cypress

Cypress is a testing tool framework we can use to perform end-to-end testing in our modern vue applications. Cypress can perform different testing types, such as component, integration and end-to-end testing.

Vue Test Utils

Vue Test Utils is a unit testing utility library for Vue.js; it provides us with a simple and intuitive API for testing our Vue components independently from the rest of the applications. Vue Test Utils allows us to simulate user interactions, verify the rendered output of the component and assert the component’s behaviour.

Best Practices for Testing Vue Applications

Although there are many tools at our disposal that make testing our applications simple, there are other procedures we must adhere to in order to provide our users with a high-quality result. By adhering to these guidelines, we can ensure that our application has undergone extensive testing and is of the highest caliber.

Perform Component Tests

One of the very important tests to perform is a component test, as it helps to test components individually or units of code to ensure that they function correctly in isolation. By testing the components individually, we can detect and fix code errors and bugs in the early development process which can help us to reduce the cost and time of fixing the bugs after the release.

Use Vue Router for Routing

The Vue Router is the best library to use for routing in our Vue application, as advised by the Vue core team. Using the Vue Router will make it simple to develop tests that confirm the routing logic is accurate.

Use Linting

Linting aids in ensuring that our program is free of formatting issues and coding problems. The Vue-Specific ESLint plugin (eslint-plugin-vue), which is the recommended method for testing our Vue components, should be used to lint.

Test for User Interaction

We should test for every user interaction because there could be many of them when we develop our application. For instance, we should test for accessibility, button clicks, form submissions, etc. This will enable us to monitor whether our program responds to user input properly.

Use Automated Tools for Defect or Bug Tracking

Using automated tools to monitor defects or bugs is important for both testing and development engineers. These tool helps us to track defects and evaluate their span and impact. In the process of this, we may uncover unrelated issues.

Create Dedicated Software Testing Teams

A thorough penetration test can be carried out with the assistance of a specialized software testing team to assure the best performance in terms of a protected testing environment. Also, this will help in identifying and resolving any security holes before they are utilized by cybercriminals.

Perform Regression Test

Regression testing is crucial because it enables us to determine whether newly added features still function after a code change. When we add a program or modify the code, it will rerun the existing test cases to ensure they pass. This is especially useful when requirements or new features need to be implemented.

Conclusion

Testing our application is incredibly beneficial because it enables us to identify any weaknesses or issues before releasing it to consumers, preventing hackers from using such flaws against us. Additionally, it enables us to provide our users with consistent, high-quality applications. It is important to prioritize testing throughout the entire development cycle and to incorporate it as a regular part of the development process.