Front-end Testing

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Seriously, browsers are a pain in the butt.

Why Front-end Testing?

Because websites are more complex than ever:

With that, there are untold number of subtle errors that can occur on the front-end.

The Impact of Testing

Unit testing

92% of developers believed that TDD yields higher quality code, 79% thought that TDD promotes simpler design and 71% thought the approach was noticeably effective.

80% of the professional developers held that TDD was an effective approach and 78% believed the approach improves programmers' productivity

Source: An Initial Investigation of Test Driven Development in Industry

[They] realized a 20.9% decrease in test defects. Additionally, customer-reported defects during the first two years of field use increased by 2.9X while the customer base increased by 10X, indicating a relative decrease in customer-reported defects.

Source: On the Effectiveness of Unit Test Automation at Microsoft

Accessibility

According to WHO, there are 285 million people worldwide who, due to some disability (i.e. they are suffering with low vision), cannot read all content on a website. 39 million of those people are blind and cannot access any of the content via sight.

Additionally, there are 360 million people suffering from hearing loss worldwide.

Source: WHO Visual Impairment and Blindness Fact Sheet

71% of people with disabilities in the UK use the Web to find information on goods and services.

After CNET started providing transcripts, they noticed a 30% increase in traffic from Google

They doubled their visitor numbers, cut maintenance costs by two thirds, and increased natural search traffic by 50%.

Source: W3C Case Studies of Accessibility Improvements

Performance stats

A 1-second improvement correlated to a 27% increase in conversion rate.

Conversions were 27% higher for visitors who enjoyed a load time that was one second faster.

Pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds experienced a 12.8% bounce rate, while those that loaded in 3.3 seconds had a bounce rate of 20%.

Source: SOASTA Case Study

46% will not return to a site that performs poorly.

Source: SOASTA 23 stats you should know about mobile web performance

These are the Tenets of Front-end Testing

Front-end Testing Courses

Front-end Testing Resources

Front-end Testing Tutorials

Initial inspiration for this idea