name-test-files-wisely.md

Name the test files wisely

One Paragraph Explainer

You can write a lot of different UI tests and it's a good habit to have a common way of naming the test files.

It's useful because often you need to run just a type of tests, the situations could be:

• during the development process, you need to run just some of them
  • you're changing some related components and you need to check that the generated markup does not change
  • you're changing a global CSS rule and you need to run only the visual tests
  • you're changing an app flow and you need to run the whole app integration tests
• your DevOps colleague needs to be sure that everything is up and running and the easiest way to do that is launching just the E2E tests
• your building pipeline needs to run just the integration and E2E tests
• your monitoring pipeline needs a script to launch the E2E and monitoring tests

If you name your tests wisely, it will be really easy to launch just some kind of them.

Cypress:

cypress run --spec \"cypress/integration/**/*.e2e.*\"

Jest:

jest --testPathPattern=e2e\\.*$

A global way to name the test files does not exist, a suggestion could be to name them with:

• the subject you are testing
• the kind of test (integration, e2e, monitoring, component, etc.)
• the test suffix of choice (test, spec, etc.)
• the file extension (.js, .ts, .jsx, .tsx, etc.)

all of them separated by a period.

Some examples could be

• authentication.e2e.test.ts
• authentication.integration.test.ts
• site.monitoring.test.js
• login.component.test.tsx etc.