I have spoken of end to end testing in a few of my posts, but I have never actually written these types of tests, so I am looking into some of the ins and outs for when I do.

End-to-end testing is designed to make sure the flow of an application behaves as expected from start to finish. One reason to use this type of testing is to determine system dependencies. It also involves writing test cases from the user’s perspective, which helps verify real world scenarios.

There are two types of end-to-end testing: vertical and horizontal. With vertical end-to-end testing, each layer of the application is tested from top to bottom. Horizontal testing, on the other hand, happens across the context of multiple applications.

White box testing and black box testing are also associated with end-to-end testing. White box testing requires the tester to have inside knowledge about the application’s code and its functions. Black box testing, also known as functional testing, examines an application’s functionality from the outside without knowledge of its inner workings.

The end-to-end testing framework consists of building user functions, conditions for each user function, and test cases for those functions. When building the user functions, it’s important to keep track of the application’s features, the input and output for each function, and the relationships between functions.