Average protractor test script length?

Question

Looking for protractor best practices of sorts, is there any recommended 'average' length or size of an individual end to end test?

Our platforms features are all highly dependent upon on another so writing one off, short tests are proving to be difficult. The plan is to write as many scripts as needed and run them in parallel so length shouldn't matter.

Answer 1

I don't think there is a specific recommended test length threshold, but here are some of the things we've taken into account:

• measure code complexity of your tests and specify practical thresholds (we use grunt-complexity)
• enforce one top-level describe per file - this helps to avoid having multiple tests inside a single file
• group test specs by a "feature" or "screen" into directories
• try to have a single expect per it() block - one assertion per test
• use Page Object pattern
• follow the DRY principle - moving common repeated code into global "helpers" module
• use using from the jasmine-data-provider to "multiply" tests
• use custom jasmine matchers if a specific multi-step check is repeated and would benefit from being extracted into a jasmine matcher - for instance, we have a toBeActive() jasmine matcher that verifies that an element is in focus
• use ESLint static code analysis tool with the relevant eslint-plugin-jasmine and eslint-plugin-protractor plugins to enforce best-practices

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Some of the current stats from our protractor test codebase:

• total specs: 239
• the smallest spec: 12 lines
• the largest spec: 242 lines
• average spec: 66 lines