Introducing Taiko - the last mile to reliable test automation

Our primary goal at Gauge is to take the pain out of maintaining acceptance tests.

The curious case of the ‘flaky test’

When it comes to test maintenance, the biggest complaint that teams have are ‘flaky tests’.

The current set of open source tools for automating the browser are unreliable as they are not built for testing modern web applications.

Tests often fail because they are

unable to handle changes in the page structure (e.g. changing HTML for rendering an element) and/or
waiting for elements on the page to appear (e.g. Single page applications where elements change without reloading the page )

So teams end up with “flaky test suites” and ignore failing tests in order to overcome this issue.

Surely, there is a better way to make testing more reliable.

Introducing Taiko

We built Taiko to make browser automation reliable.

Taiko is a free and open source browser automation tool built by the team behind Gauge by ThoughtWorks. It is a Node.js library to automate the chrome browser. Taiko is built ground up to test modern web applications.

Taiko creates highly readable and maintainable JavaScript tests. It’s simple API, smart selectors and implicit waits all work together towards a single goal - No more flaky tests.

Fighting ‘flakiness’ with Smart Selectors & Taiko’s API

Taiko Smart Selectors help test web applications without depending on the internal page structure. Taiko tests web applications like a user, not a developer.

For example, here is a code snippet to google for ‘gauge test automation’ using the Selenium WebDriver

var browser = new webdriver.
                 Builder().
                 usingServer().
                 withCapabilities({'browserName': 'chrome' }).
                 build();

browser.get('https://www.google.com');

// Uses HTML locators, elements, form submissions etc.
browser.findElement(webdriver.By.name('q')).sendKeys('gauge test automation');
browser.findElement(webdriver.By.name('btnG')).click();

vs the same test script in Taiko.

openBrowser()
goto(“https://www.google.com”)

// API for testing like a user
write(‘gauge test automation’)
press(‘Enter’)

As you can see, in Taiko, testers don’t have to know the underlying code reducing the likelihood of test failures when code is refactored without changing functionality.

Taiko’s API understands actions that trigger XHR request or fetch dynamic content.

It implicitly waits for them to complete before moving on to the next action. This means that you don't have to add ‘flaky’ wait times in your tests.

For example, using the same test case as above, we want to wait for the page to load before performing an action. To do this with Selenium WebDriver, we have to ‘wait’ on an element before ‘clicking it’.

var browser = new webdriver.
                    Builder().
                    usingServer().
                    withCapabilities({'browserName': 'chrome' }).
                    build
browser.get('https://www.google.com')

function findGaugeLink() {
    return browser.findElements(webdriver.
                                By.css('[href="https://gauge.org"]')).
                                then((result) => result[0]);
}

browser.get('https://www.google.com');
browser.findElement(webdriver.By.name('q')).sendKeys('gauge test automation');
browser.findElement(webdriver.By.name('btnG')).click();
browser.wait(findGaugeLink, 2000).then((link) => link.click())

When we have the same test case in Taiko, we don’t need to manually add a ‘wait’ time since Taiko detects a page load and automatically waits.

openBrowser()
goto(“https://www.google.com”)

write(‘gauge test automation’)
press(‘Enter’)
click(‘Open Source Test Automation Framework | Gauge’)

Taiko is in beta and we are looking to (forgive the pun!) gauge your experience and features that make test automation delightful.

We’d love your feedback on Taiko and here’s how you can get started.

Get Started with Gauge and Taiko

Using Taiko with Gauge (which promotes reusable markdown-based specifications) minimizes code between the Gauge specification and the Taiko test script.

Reducing the amount of code reduces bugs and makes maintenance easier.

Taiko works on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

You need to have Node.js installed in your system to start writing Taiko scripts in JavaScript. After you’ve installed Node.js, open a terminal application (or powershell in the case of Windows).

Install Gauge and Taiko using npm

npm install -g @getgauge/cli

and initialize a sample project using

gauge init js

After creating your project, you can run the sample specification.

gauge run specs

Install as a standalone library

You can also choose to install Taiko as a standalone library using

npm install -g taiko

You’re now all set to start using Taiko! You can learn more about using Taiko from the documentation.

Learn more