Nowadays cypress is quite a hype technology (I am saying this in Fall 2020, everyone knows how rapidly js world can change ;))

"Cypress is a next generation front end testing tool built for the modern web."

https://docs.cypress.io/guides/overview/why-cypress.html#In-a-nutshel

I had some experience with Behat and other types of tests like unit/integarational, but today I will tell you about e2e.

When I wrote Behat tests I didn't think a lot about how to structure my test cases in a maintainable way. This led me to the antipattern called "Single-Layer Architecture"[1].

Extending such tests quickly becomes a mess and tends to become an ineffective work:

1. You can't focus on business logic, you always need to remember low-level details to introduce a new step definition
2. Your low-level solutions are often duplicated, and you even don't notice that
3. Changing testing framework means rewriting or updating all step definitions!

Fortunately there is an approach which is very easy to follow and which mitigates mentioned issues.

When changing client code, you need to somehow force the client's browser to reload the modified files. This problem is quite common. Most likely, you will encounter it regardless of the technologies you use in web development. This example is about solving the problem when creating a frontend project using JavaScript and Gulp.

You can solve it in several ways.

Let's say, for example, 7e50961489 is the new version of the assets. Actually, it can be any version, the main thing is that it should be different from the previous ones. You can simply number them - 1, 2, 3, etc. But it's not very convenient. Later it will be clear why.

The solution is not perfect. But it is suitable for developing a small frontend project written in coffeescript and less. Important note: the use of backend is not provided. Nodejs is only used for building assets (this solution is convenient, for example, if you plan to create a hybrid offline application for smartphones).

The key features of our project, and as a result, the gulp file:

1) Supports different environments (prod, dev, etc)

2) Compilation and minification of less, CoffeScript files, combining multiple into one (concatenation)

3) Support for tests (jasmine)

4) In the dev environment, watch is functioning (dynamically rebuilds assets when source files are changed)