Infra: Automated End-to-End Testing

[dsernst]

Valuable to build automated end-to-end tests for the core features of SIV:

Thinking about the user flow chronologically:

• [x] Acquisition: someone lands on the SIV site and all the public pages — /, /protocol, /faq, /about — render
• [ ] Activation: they can sign up for a free account on the /login page
• [x] Usage: they can create & run SIV elections
  • [x] login to admin panel
  • [x] create new election
  • [x] set ballot design
  • [x] invite verifying observers
  • [x] run keygen w/ verifying observers
  • [x] add voters
  • [x] voters can vote
  • [x] begin unlocking votes
  • [x] observers shuffle
  • [x] anonymous, verifiable results published on election status page 🎉

[arianabuilds]

Potential Tools:

• BackstopJS - free, open-source tool for visual regression testing. It uses screenshots and a report to help you spot visual changes. However, it might need more setup than other tools as it doesn't offer a built-in cloud-based service.
• Wraith - a screenshot comparison tool developed by the BBC News team. It's a free, open-source tool that uses a headless browser to create screenshots of webpages on different environments and then creates a diff of the two images. (amongst David's choices)
• Diffy - visual regression testing tool that compares visuals of web pages and reports differences. It offers a free tier with limited usage and paid plans for larger volumes of testing.
• Cypress - powerful end-to-end testing framework that also supports visual testing through plugins like cypress-image-snapshot.
• Puppeteer - to automate the process of taking screenshots, we could use a headless browser like Puppeteer, a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.
• PhantomCSS

Note

In order to check the changes made in a PR, you'll need to integrate your visual testing tool with your version control system (like Git) and your CI/CD pipeline.