Automated web testing (2023)

ADR started in February 2023.

Context and problem statement

What technical solution for end-2-end (e2e) testing on web applications to start with?

Tests can be run from the command line, with no link to an external service (no SaaS)
Test reports can be generated in HTML format
Language must be part of: .NET, Go, TypeScript
(Optional) Pipelines for code lifecycle & test execution are easy to make

Tools
- Cucumber (GitHub org)
  - Godog official: active development
  - GoBDD unofficial (docs): no release since 2021
- Cypress (docs, sources ★ 42.6k)
  - Guides: Page Object Model by BrowserStack, Cucumber
- Jest (docs, sources ★ 41.4k)
- Playwright (docs, sources ★ 47.7k)
  - Guides: Page Object Models, BDD
- Selenium (docs, sources ★ 25.8k)
  - tebeka/selenium: no update since 2021
  - sourcegraph/go-selenium: no update since 2017
- Taiko (sources ★ 3.2k)
Patterns
- Page Object
- BDD (Behavior-Driven Development)
  - Gherkin language

🟡 Cypress is an proven solution but there is a risk the company change its open source strategy over time (and restrict for example the featureset or license model)
🟠 Jest is very interesting for unit/integration testing, maybe not well suited for e2e testing.
🟢 Playwright has a very good documentation and featureset, not linked to a company ← we have our winner!
🟠 Selenium has no strong drivers in Go (as of today) and doesn't have the modern features the recent technologies have
🔴 Taiko doesn't have the same audience as the other massively used tools