Over the past few years, VueJS has become one of the most popular web application frameworks. That is no surprise given how flexible, easy to use, and productive it is. But none of these would matter if you haven’t tested your application correctly.

Software testing refines the whole process and ensures superior quality to the product. Also, it reduces maintenance costs and provides better usability and enhanced functionality.

No matter what type of testing you want to do, choosing the right toolset is a significant factor in optimizing the software testing process.

Therefore, in this article, I will introduce the five testing tools for VueJS, addressing different testing perspectives.

1. Component Testing with Vue Test Utils & Jest

Jest is a well-liked JavaScript testing framework that comes packed with many goodies for developers focusing on simplicity.

It’s one of the fastest testing frameworks for Vue single-file components. Other than Vue, Jest works with other frameworks, libraries, and platforms like React, Angular, and Node. It is also compatible with Babel and TypeScript.

However, you need to use a separate package called Vue Test Utils to mount Vue components, andthen Jest can be used to execute the components’ unit test.

Vue Test Utils is the official unit testing library for Vue.js, and it is a set of utility functions provided to simplify testing of Vue.js components. It also provides methods to mount and interact with Vue components in an isolated manner.

Apart from running tests, Jest comes with loads of other features like code coverage, mocks, and snapshot testing.

2. Vue Performance DevTool for Performance Testing

Speed, stability, and scalability are three key factors that must be considered and improved before your product goes to the market.

Performance testing is a testing mechanism to measure and identify all the aforementioned performance-related bottlenecks.

Vue Performance DevTools is a browser extension designed to inspect the performance of Vue components. It statistically checks a Vue component’s performance based on the measures collected by Vue using the window.performance API.

Some of the many uses of Vue Performance DevTools are as follows:

• Unmount or remove the component instances which are not being used.
• Inspect the factors which block or take more time after an operation has been started.
• Inspects the component, which takes more time to load.

3. Authoring, testing, and sharing independent Vue components

Bit is an open-source platform for component development with Vue, React, or Angular, establishing industry-leading best practices by design.

Bit enables the authoring of multiple independent components, all in the same workspace.

Once a component is ready for release, Bit re-creates it (copy its files, install its packages, etc) in its own environment, isolated from its “origin” workspace.

Bit tests each component inside its own isolated environment, to ensure it is not only functional but also functional as an independent component (i.e, if it works in an isolated environment, it will work when installed/cloned into another project).

The type of test runner is determined by the tester component used by the component.

4. E2E Testing with Cypress

Modern web applications are a combination of various sub-components and systems. It is challenging to test and diagnose errors in these complicated applications by examining the functional flow. End to end testing was introduced to address this issue, and with E2E testing, you can ensure the application’s complete health from all perspectives.

Cypress is a Javascript-based end to end testing framework which is built on top of Mocha. It provides fast, reliable, and easy testing for anything that runs on the browser.

It doesn’t matter whether your application is component-based, uses frontend components, or uses server rendering; Cypress is independent of any particular framework. It simulates the behavior of a regular user as if they were using your application.

Apart from testing E2E using Cypress, you can use it to perform unit tests and integration tests as well.

To make your testing experience truly painless Cypress team has put a lot of thought when designing this end to end test runner. Built-in recording, simple CI setup, robust API, and many other features make Cypress a developer-friendly E2E tool.

You can write end to end tests for the Vue application using the official @vue/CLI-plugin-e2e-cypres plugin.

5. Perform UI Testing with Storybook

User experience has become a significant aspect in web development, and regardless of good functionalities, your application would fail if there are defects in the User Interface.

Due to the subtle and subjective nature of a design, UIs are tricky to test. If we are going to test them manually, it will take a large amount of time, and the whole development process will be affected. But don’t worry! This is where the Storybook — an open-source tool for developing and testing UIs comes to the rescue.

Storybook is a tool that helps you to build components in an isolated manner and to record their states as stories. No matter how complex it is, stories make it easy to explore a component in all its arrangements.

A story records the ways your component can be used. Thus, you can use a complete set of stories as a catalog of all the essential use cases to test in your component.

A complete Storybook testing is a combination of the following techniques, but you can also choose one or a few of them based on your requirements.

1. Manual tests: Help to sanity check a component’s appearance.
2. Unit tests: Good for testing the functional qualities of a component.
3. Visual regression tests: Used to identify UI appearance bugs.
4. Interactions tests: Used to assert things about the way it renders and changes.
5. Snapshot tests: Catches markup changes that cause rendering errors and warnings.

Final Words

Whether it is a unit test or end to end test, or a user acceptance test, having a proper test can save you even from a small software bug that can cause an expensive loss.

Apart from that, testing can ensure performance, reliability, security, and customer satisfaction if you follow the correct testing methods. Besides, it requires high discipline from developers to continuously improve tests.

However, you can also improve the efficiency by using the proper toolset in your hands.

In this article, I’ve mentioned five tools and libraries you can use for testing your Vue.js application. If there any other tools you have used for testing purposes with VueJs, please let me know in the comments section.

Thank you for Reading !!!