Improved Browser Testing on Heroku with Chrome

For developers and businesses offering a web-based product, automated browser testing is a critical tool to ensure continuous delivery of a reliable service. Developers write browser tests by scripting actions against a real browser, simulating real usage by navigating, selecting, and making assertions about web pages and their document elements.

In this post, we introduce a new community buildpack that helps with automated browser testing. The new buildpack resolves installation reliability problems in the existing Chrome browser buildpacks for Heroku apps.

Developers can manually run browser tests on their machines to support writing and debugging tests. They can automate browser tests with continuous integration tools like Heroku CI to run in response to code updates and catch new problems on feature branches before they’re merged and released. They can also automate browser tests with a continuous end-to-end testing service. For example, running the test suite every hour to catch new problems with a customer-facing app.

At Heroku, we use automated browser testing to ensure the reliability of the Heroku Dashboard, our primary web interface. Continuous testing of the dashboard and related interfaces throughout their lifecycle, from feature development to monitoring the production system, is essential for early bug detection, quality assurance, and adaptability.

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