Comparative Analysis of UI Testing Frameworks for Web Applications

Creating web applications is no abnormality today, since every company and nearly every private person owns content online. Therefore, the focus is put on the reliable functionalities of the components. However, providing perfectly working features is a hard challenge, but fortunately there are many possibilities out there, that help developers testing their user interface in an objective manner. The difficulty for the developer remains in selecting the right tool to test their website features in a satisfying way and with as little trouble in setup and boundaries as possible. When the decision is made by other persons, a good comparison has to be done, regarding subjective preferences and hard prevailing circumstances. Merging these conditions and getting comprehensible results is a process, that consumes a lot of time and preparation.

The aim of this thesis is to present and discuss the UI testing frameworks Selenium, Jest and Cypress. A scientific method has been defined, which is called "Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)", to reach the objective of choosing a fitting framework that suits the developer and their determined requirements. To fulfil this goal, some fundamental basics are introduced as well as an assortment of frameworks. After defining the criteria, the frameworks are getting compared against each other, until a final result is made. Regarding the results in beforehand, no comparison method is able to determine the most appropriate or best framework for certain use cases. Individuality is a big part of developing and each developer creating web components has other affinities, strengths and thoughts. However, this thesis provides a possible guide in deciding the most convenient framework for JavaScript web components.