The Essential Guide To End-to-End Testing | E2E Testing 101

End-to-end testing is one of the most effective ways to ensure the quality of the product you will be shipping. However, it’s not an easy task to make a jump to this methodology. If the thought of end-to-end testing makes you sweat, this article will help you shape up.

What is End-to-end Testing?

End-to-end (E2E) testing is defined as a technique that tests the entire software product from beginning to end to ensure the application flow behaves as expected. The goal of this testing type is to test from the end user’s experience. It also helps define the product’s system dependencies and ensure all integrated pieces work together as expected.

Why E2E testing matters

E2E testing matters to many groups within an organization, such as managers, testers and developers. 

• Managers: Managers like this testing procedure as it lets them know how a failing test would impact the user. 

• Testers: Testers find E2E testing useful as it helps them verify real-world behavior, and as such, they can avoid problems and achieve a greater sense of accomplishment.
• Developers: Developers benefit from it because most of the testing is offloaded to others.

Benefits of E2E Testing

The adoption of E2E testing yields the following advantages:

• Expand test coverage
• Ensure the correctness of the application
• Reduce time to market
• Reduce cost
• Detect bugs

E2E Testing Life Cycle

An end-to-end testing life cycle consists of the following main components:

• Test planning: Specifies key tasks, associated schedule, and resources
• Test design: Test specifications, test case generation, risk analysis, usage analysis, and scheduling tests
• Test execution: Executes test cases and documents testing results
• Results analysis: Analyzes test results, evaluate testing, and perform additional testing if necessary

When to Apply E2E Testing?

E2E testing is regularly conducted on finished products and systems, making each review a test of the completed system. A second test will take place if the system does not output what is expected or if a problem is found. In this case, the team will have to record and analyze the data to determine the issue’s origin; then fix and re-test them.

Learn more on how to implement an E2E testing scenario in this article

E2E Testing Methods

Vertical E2E Testing

This method refers to testing in layers, meaning that tests happen in sequential, hierarchical order. To ensure quality, each component of a system or product is tested from start to finish. Vertical testing is often used to test critical components of a complex computing system which does not typically involve users or interfaces.

Horizontal E2E Testing

A commonly used method occurring horizontally across the context of multiple applications and easily takes place in a single ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application. Here’s an example. A Web-based application of an e-commerce system includes accounts, product inventory status, and shipping details.

Metrics For E2E Testing

Some of the many metrics used for E2E testing are:

• Test Case Preparation Status: Used to determine the specific position of the test cases that are under preparation, compared to planned test cases.
• Test Progress Tracking: Test progress should be tracked on a weekly basis. This step will provide regular details of test completion percentage, such as passed/failed, executed/unexecuted, valid/invalid test cases, and so on.
• Defects Status and Details: It gives a weekly percentage of open and closed defects. Also, weekly defect distributions are based on severity and priority.
• Environment Availability: The actual number of operational hours and hours scheduled per day for testing.

Automate End-to-End Testing in Katalon Studio

Katalon Studio is an excellent automation tool that can make your end-to-end tests less complicated. There are three core features in Katalon Studio that you can use to apply E2E testing: recorder, built-in keywords, and custom keywords.

Conclusion

Nowadays, software systems are complex and interconnected with numerous subsystems. If any of the subsystems fails, the whole software system could crash. And this is a major risk and can be avoided by E2E testing. This explains, in part, why E2E testing are currently widely adopted in the industry. So now it’s a good time for you to start learning E2E testing if you haven’t done so, it will be a valuable skillset with high demand for the future to come.