Posted by To run a Magento store efficiently, the store owner needs to be careful in checking and testing the website.
To me, Magento 2 testing framework is not just making sure a website works; it is a continual focus on making sure the site is as good as it possibly can be. Magento 2 test applies to any aspect, whether that is usability, browser compatibility, performance, or functionality.
In this article, we will dig deeper into the testing framework for Magento platform.
Why Magento 2 Testing?
Imagine that you are going to launch your fantastic new Magento 2 store and have high hopes for generating lots of new inquiries and customers.
Before launching the site in the final moments, you need to spend a lot of time and effort clicking around to ensure that everything is in the right place, all the links are correct, and nothing bad happens. It must be when your website is ready to launch, and you can sit back to take a breather.
However, when the website is just launched, it does not run as smoothly as you may think. Customers browse your store and start hitting problems. For example, the website does not display correctly for these people, the Magento layout is broken, some images don’t load properly, and your visitors ultimately have a bad experience when using your site.
You come up with some possible reasons for the issues. Your buyers may use different web browsers with several screen resolutions and different operating systems to the one you use. However, the problem can mostly come from your poor Magento 2 test.
Anyway, your customers may decide not to continue visiting your site and click away. It’s time you get real trouble with your Magento store and start posing some of the following questions.
- Did you test where those forms send their essential information and that it correctly worked when someone fills in a contact form?
- Your online shop has a problem with its payment processing and, therefore, people cannot complete their cart. How strictly did you test the checkout process?
- Other visitors arrive at your website from search engines. Unfortunately, they hit 404 page not found errors. Did you save a list of pages that your previous website had and make sure that you correctly redirect visitors to your new pages?
The above are just a few examples of real problems that can easily occur when launching a new website through inadequate or incomplete testing before the website was launched.
In fact, testing websites is often not a fun task unless you have an obsession with a broken store. Plus, the testing process can be very time-consuming, but it is a necessary phase for any website project, which should be planned for and carried out to the best possible outcome.
Good testing can ultimately result in significant improvement in terms of shopping experience. For example, if the site can satisfy the overall user experience, more people will submit inquiries or make contact with your company. Moreover, customers who already bought products and services from you will possibly come back to your site again and again.
What is Magento 2 Testing Framework?
Now, I’m pretty sure you got the picture that the Magento 2 test is vital to ensure the website is released to the world as it is intended to be viewed and used. Before diving into the benefits of Magento 2 testing frameworks, let’s clarify what a Magento 2 testing framework actually is.
“In general, a testing framework is a set of guidelines or rules used to create and design website testing cases.”
A framework can consist of a combination of practices and tools that are designed to help quality assurance professionals test more efficiently. These guidelines can include coding standards, object repositories, processes for storing test results, test-data handling methods, or the method to access external resources.
Although these rules are not entirely compulsory and testers can still script or record Magento 2 tests without following them, using an organized framework provides additional benefits that would otherwise be missed out.
Benefits of Using Magento 2 Testing Framework
Taking advantage of a framework for automated and large-scale testing will increase a team’s test speed and efficiency. By testing with a framework, your test accuracy will be improved, and the test maintenance costs, as well as lower risks, can be reduced.
They are essential to an efficient automated testing process for a few key reasons:
- Lower maintenance costs
- Minimal manual intervention
- Maximum test coverage
- Reusability of code
- Improved test efficiency
What Can Do with A Magento 2 Testing Framework?
Ensure the website quality
Functional testing
Functional tests help you simulate customer behavior on a sample ecommerce website and check if everything on the frontend works flawlessly.
Here is how it happens in practice. As one of the test scenarios, testers interact directly with page objects and try possible actions such as clicking Home or getting guest order code. Besides, they imitate the actions of a typical customer by placing an order on the website and check how successful and unsuccessful payments unfold from a customer’s perspective.
Functional testing should be applied at each stage of the Magento store life cycle. Once a Magento website is configured, the overall performance also needs to be checked. If the developers add or change some functionality to your store, testing the changes don’t affect the normal operation of the store.
Integration testing
When giant companies choose to digitize their business workflows, we integrate Magento with external supporting technologies such as CRM, ERP, or PIM.
The integration test comes to help to ensure seamless interaction between the platform and integration. Specifically, it checks if data flows correctly within store parts, and updates get reflected in all the systems involved. For example, we test if the product distribution process gets added to the employee’s database in ERP extension to ensure data synchronization functions well.
(You can also browse other Magento extensions that we have spent all our time carefully checking HERE!)
Integration testing plays an important role in projects with multi-component IT infrastructures and requires a good understanding of interconnections and dependencies between the ecosystem constituents.
Our team mastered integration testing through collaboration with an omnichannel retailer – we built a complex IT environment with a Magento application connected to a number of business-critical systems and internal tools.
Web API functional testing
The purpose of Web API functional testing is to check the Magento Web APIs’ operation and reveal any deviations from the supposed performance.
Magento 2 is optimal for both web service communication protocols – REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), so the test can be conducted with either REST or SOAP.
Despite being invisible for customers, multiple Web APIs on Magento websites act as connectors to third-party servers. We can take social marketing as an example. This marketing strategy has proved to be effective for customer acquisition. That is the reason why it is encouraged to reinforce the brand identity with social presence.
For that, when the accounts via social Web APIs connect to Magento and synchronize the updates in most stores, Web API functional testing is crucial.
Ensure Magento Code Quality
JavaScript testing
JavaScript is undeniably one of the three main pillars in web development.
Its responsibility includes creating a dynamic and interactive experience for users. Accordingly, most of the functionality on Magento 2 websites is JavaScript-powered ranging from dropdown lists, videos, animated page elements like resizing to relocating.
Aiming at enhancing customer experience, all the features on the frontend can have precisely the opposite effect if crash. Having stumbled upon a single malfunction alone, customers may naturally question the website quality on the whole. Meanwhile, customers’ trust is undoubtedly the foundation for their loyalty.
Thus, JavaScript testing ensures that all JavaScript elements in a Magento-based store function as expected. We can test JavaScript modules and other JavaScript portions of the UI. These tests are similar to the integration test used for server-side testing.
Static testing
The static test is always a rule to start with the Magento code audit when landing a new project. The test is to detect bugs and vulnerabilities before they result in website malfunctions and security breaches.
The initial purpose of static tests is to check if PHP and JavaScript code corresponds to Magento 2 coding standards and best practices. Conveniently, static tests allow us to analyze code without running it. When extending the functionality of Magento websites, developers initiate static tests to detect code quality issues as soon as possible.
Static testing in Magento consists of several tests to ensure the code stability and quality. In addition to JavaScript and PHP, more complicated integrity tests target complex scenarios like circular dependency or exception hierarchy.
Unit testing
While conducting unit testing on Magento 2, developers focus on a single unit of PHP code to check a particular function or module.
Let’s imagine that you have customized the checkout page and launched it even when untested. In the worst case, customers may run into issues while completing the purchase and abandon the process. To prevent these errors, we recommend testing each unit of the code during the development stage.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we have covered every aspect of the Magento 2 test for ecommerce stores. We hope this guide will help you save time and effort in the testing process.
If you’re still confused about the process, don’t hesitate to drop your comments below or check out other posts on Mageguides. We will get back to you!