How Smashtest Is Changing The Way You Write Selenium Tests?

4 min readJan 10, 2020

Have you heard about this programming language? This language is called Smashtest that is purposely designed for automation test engineers to help them automate their testing cycle’s up to 10X faster. Smashtest strongly focuses on enhancing the test engineer’s performance by expressing succinctly in the language the recurring testing chores performed by software developers.

The new programming language comes with dedicated tooling comprising a test runner which can effortlessly run tests in parallel, and a read–eval–print loop (REPL). It can test 10 times faster and support several devices like mobile and browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, but you require downloading the driver from Selenium.

Smashtest can test both API and Web UI testing. The good part that it provides is Live Report which will demonstrate all test cases pass and fail with the screenshot. Test engineers love the debug mode in Smashtest so much. It can be used very easily. Below is an image of a Smashtest’s official website.

The major novel feature of the Smashtest is that it allows testers to declaratively illustrate their tests in a tree-like format. The following Smashtest script given on its website:

The Smashtest programming language comprises a mocking API, allowing to mock time and geo-location. We can also illustrate network conditions and throttling in the language (feature only available on the browser like Chrome). The language also counts an API for finding elements on a page, to conduct assertions.

The Smashtest CLI (Command-Line Interface) comprises tooling for Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery and a REPL interpreter. The Command Line Interface can additionally create reports with auto-generated screenshots:

Test Automation with Selenium

Test automation with Selenium is famous since various programming languages such as C#, Python, PERL, Java, etc. can be used with that automation framework. Test Automation requires exclusive and highly advanced infrastructure than manual testing since the tests might be carried out in parallel to maximize the throughput. When it comes to testing automation of web products, automated cross-browser tests becomes significant as the behavior may not be the same on multiple operating systems, browsers, and devices. For instance, a web page may render properly on chrome installed on windows, however, it might not render correctly on chrome installed on Mac operating system.

As we all know, that the duration taken by the tests to execute not only depends on the good organization of the test cases (from an implementation standpoint) but also depends on the infrastructure on which the tests are being implemented. A perfectly written test can take extra time to perform if executed on a less powerful machine. While you can also use cloud-based infrastructure for automated cross-browser tests, which would be fat better we can improve the overall performance of test automation with Selenium for rapidly deploying test cases. This is where “Smashtest” comes into play to help you test even more rapidly.

Smashtest — Develop and Deploy Test Cases Fast

Smashtest is a language that allows you to accelerate your test automation cycle by writing tests in a tree-like set-up. Trees loosely demonstrate the thinking in writing a test scenario/ test case. For instance, the task ‘Open google.com in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browser’ is written as the following in Smashtest programming language.