End-To-End Testing: 2024 E2E Testing Guide

Chris Schwartz

August 1, 2024

Ensuring that your business processes work seamlessly from start to finish is more critical than ever. This is why end-to-end (E2E) testing is now indispensable.

By simulating and validating key user journeys, organizations can identify and mitigate potential issues before they escalate, ensuring a seamless and satisfying experience for all users.

In this guide, we explain why E2E testing is essential for maintaining the integrity of your systems, and discuss best practices for thorough and efficient testing. We also share real-world examples to illustrate the impact of E2E testing and give some practical implementation tips.

Skip ahead to:

What is E2E Testing?
Why E2E Testing is Important
E2E Testing Example: Retail
Benefits of E2E Testing
Challenges of E2E Testing
E2E Testing Best Practices
How to Implement E2E Testing in 6 Steps
Manual vs. automated E2E Testing
Choosing Your Governance Model
Conclusion

What is E2E testing?

End-to-end testing validates whether all system components can run under real-world scenarios by simulating a user experience from start to finish.

Imagine a car assembly line where each part is added step-by-step. E2E testing is like running a quality check from the start of the assembly line to the finished car, ensuring every part and process works perfectly together.

It’s not enough for individual features like the wheels, steering wheel, gearbox, and brakes to work independently. They must all function well together.

It doesn't matter if the wheels are perfectly designed if they don't turn properly when the steering wheel is used, or if the gearbox works in isolation but fails to coordinate with the engine and brakes. E2E testing would ensure that all these components interact correctly, resulting in a car that drives smoothly and safely.

The modern definition of E2E testing is much broader than it used to be. While it used to just look inside a single application, now it typically spans many different applications.

As businesses become more digitized and complex, the need to ensure that integrated components across applications work flawlessly becomes even more crucial.

This means validating the system’s integration and data integrity across all interconnected modules, ensuring the entire process functions as intended.

Why E2E testing is important

E2E testing is critical as it assesses your system’s entire workflow, identifying issues that unit or integration tests might miss.

This aligns with the principles of the testing pyramid, a concept that remains a trusted guide in agile software development.

testing pyramid

The testing pyramid emphasizes a strong foundation of unit tests, a solid middle layer of integration tests, and a crucial top layer of E2E tests.

End-to-end testing offers a unique and comprehensive view of system behavior that other testing methods can't provide, focusing on validating the entire user journey.

Of course, it is important that individual components work as intended. But your business is more concerned about its customer or business user journeys across components, and being able to validate these.

You might have a cutting-edge web-based application at the beginning of a process that works perfectly when isolated, but this application might be integrated with multiple legacy applications, and these processes need to be tested.

By validating the complete user journey, businesses can ensure that all parts of the system work together harmoniously, which is essential for maintaining user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

E2E testing example: retail

Consider a retail company with a popular online store. The retailer wants to ensure that every step of the customer journey, from browsing to receiving the product, works seamlessly. E2E testing would involve validating each step of this process.

Here’s a detailed look at the process and the steps that need to be validated:

Order placement: When a customer places an order through the online store, the system validates the order, checking availability and ensuring real-time inventory data is accurate.
Payment processing: The system processes the payment through a secure gateway, verifying that all transactions are seamless and secure.
Inventory update: Upon payment confirmation, the inventory system updates stock levels, ensuring no overselling or stock discrepancies.
Order confirmation: The customer receives an order confirmation email with details and an estimated delivery date. This step tests the email integration system for timely and error-free communication.
Shipping logistics: The order details are sent to the warehouse for fulfillment. The warehouse system generates a picking list, ensuring the order information is accurately transmitted and processed.
Shipping and delivery: The shipping system calculates the best delivery route and dispatches the order. This step includes verifying that shipping details are updated and that the customer receives a tracking number to monitor the order until delivery.
Returns management: If the customer needs to return the product, the returns process should be seamless. This step involves validating the returns request submission, updating inventory levels upon receiving the returned product, processing the refund, and sending confirmation emails to the customer.

By validating each step in this process from start to finish, E2E testing ensures that the entire workflow operates smoothly, maintaining high standards of customer satisfaction.

Real world E2E testing example: Mattress Firm

Challenge: Mattress Firm aimed to enhance its customer experiences and ensure the seamless operation of Microsoft Dynamics 365, a suite of applications essential for running critical business processes. Any disruption to Dynamics 365 could directly impact customer satisfaction and revenue.

Solution: Mattress Firm sought a robust solution for end-to-end testing from point of sale to delivery. They selected Leapwork for its user-friendly visual automation platform, integration compatibility, and rapid implementation.

Impact: Through Leapwork, Mattress Firm achieved efficient end-to-end testing across core business applications, accelerating development and improving the customer journey. Notably, checkout times were reduced by 20%, significantly improving the point-of-sale experience.

Read Mattress Firm’s story in full

Benefits of E2E testing

Verifying the journey from an end user’s perspective enables you to ensure better quality from a business perspective, not just from an isolated software perspective.

Here are the main benefits:

Holistic validation: Ensures the entire system works together, not just individual components.
Improved quality: Detects integration issues, ensuring better data integrity and functional correctness across modules.
Enhanced user experience: Validates workflows from the user’s perspective, ensuring smooth and efficient operations.
Reduced risk: Identifies and mitigates potential points of failure in the system’s workflow.
Business alignment: Ensures IT deliverables align with business requirements, supporting business processes effectively.

Challenges of E2E testing

More complexity can mean more challenges, but also more rewards.

When testing E2E, you need to collaborate with multiple business teams and units. A cross-team group might include testers, QA managers, application managers, business process owners, and end users.

This shift to bringing in more stakeholders requires a new mindset.

Here are the main challenges:

Complexity: Involves testing across multiple systems and integrations, which can be complex and time-consuming.
Resource intensive: Requires significant resources, including time, personnel, and tools, to execute comprehensive E2E tests.
Coordination: Necessitates collaboration between various teams and business units, which can be challenging to manage. Process owners are typically quite senior within an organization and have busy calendars. However, as this is a high stakes strategic initiative, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get their interest and involvement, as long as the project is briefed accurately.
Maintenance: Keeping E2E tests up-to-date with system changes can be demanding, requiring continuous effort to maintain test accuracy.
Tooling: Selecting the right tools that can handle diverse applications and technologies involved in the business processes.

E2E testing best practices

Implementing E2E testing requires more than just technical teams. QA should work closely with the stakeholders who own applications or processes to become familiar with entire user journeys. Only then can they be properly validated.

Here are some best practices to make your E2E testing more effective.

Here are some best practices:

Early involvement of QA: Bring QA teams into the development process early. They should understand the business processes and requirements from the beginning. This early involvement ensures that QA can plan and design tests that truly reflect the business needs.
Foster collaboration: You need strong collaboration between developers, QA, and business users. QA teams understand the testing mindset, but business users and process owners have deep insights into how processes should work. Working together ensures a better understanding of the entire workflow and more comprehensive test coverage.
Use realistic data: You should use realistic test data that mirrors production data as closely as possible. This enhances the accuracy of your tests and ensures that your testing scenarios are relevant. AI is changing the way teams approach test data generation as it can be used to generate synthetic data.
Automation where possible: Automate as much of the E2E testing process as possible. Automation reduces human error, increases efficiency, and allows you to run tests more frequently. However, understand that not everything can or should be automated and you need a test automation strategy. Focus on automating high-impact, low-complexity test cases first.
Regular maintenance: Continuously update and maintain your E2E tests to reflect any changes in the system or business processes. This ensures that your tests remain relevant and accurate over time. Regular maintenance also involves validating that the automated tests still work as expected after updates.

How to implement E2E testing in 6 steps

While E2E testing can be complex, breaking it down into manageable steps can streamline the process and enhance its effectiveness. Here are six key steps to successfully implement E2E testing in your organization:

Identify key user journeys: Begin by identifying the key business processes and user flows that need to be tested. Focus on journeys that are critical to your business operations. Examples include order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes.
Design your test cases: Create detailed test cases for each identified scenario. These test cases should cover all possible user interactions and system integrations. Collaborate with business analysts and process owners to ensure all aspects are covered.
Set up the test environment: Ensure your test environment closely replicates your production environment. This includes having the same configurations, data, and integrations. A realistic test environment helps in identifying issues that could occur in the live system and actual user journeys.
Automate testing: Use an automation platform to build, stablize, maintain, and scale your E2E testing. Choose a solution that can handle the complexity of your business processes and integrate well with your existing systems.
Execute and monitor: Run your tests, monitor the results, and log any issues for resolution. Monitoring is crucial to understand how well your tests are performing and to identify any areas that need improvement.
Review and refine: Regularly revisiting your test cases helps in maintaining their relevance and accuracy. Based on feedback and system changes, update your tests to ensure they remain effective. When a new capability is introduced, it’s critical to execute E2E tests alongside other functional tests before pushing updates into production. This approach takes a holistic view, ensuring that any new functionality integrates seamlessly into the entire process, identifying dependencies and potential ripple effects.

Manual vs. automated E2E testing

Manual E2E testing involves human testers executing test cases without automation tools.

Manual testing can be beneficial for complex scenarios that require human judgment and for tests that are run infrequently. However, manual testing can be time-consuming, prone to human error, and less efficient for large-scale testing.

Automated E2E testing uses software tools to automatically execute test cases and validate the outcomes. This approach is ideal for repetitive and frequent tests, offering higher efficiency, accuracy, and coverage.

Test automation tools can simulate user interactions across multiple systems, ensuring that all components work together seamlessly.

Implementing automated E2E testing requires careful planning and the right tools to ensure comprehensive coverage and smooth operation across all integrated systems.

Popular tools for automated E2E testing include Selenium, Leapwork, and Tricentis Tosca. Automated E2E testing tools can vary significantly in their features, ease of use, and suitability for different types of applications. When selecting your tool, consider the complexity of the workflows you need to automate, the tool’s maintainability, ramp-up time, and your team's skill set.

Choosing your governance model

Whatever your approach to testing is now, and has been before, it’s worth considering the governance model your organization might want to adopt to support E2E testing.

If your organization is looking to bring in automation best practices, then a governance model with centralized test automation experts, also known as a center of excellence, works best.

These experts ensure that team members are trained in automation and act as a center of excellence, providing best practices and guidance. However, the actual contributors to the automation may be key users or business analysts spread across various departments.

This approach ensures that the expertise is centralized, but the execution is distributed, leveraging the specific knowledge and context of different business units.

This model can be particularly effective in large organizations where different teams need to collaborate and maintain consistent testing standards across diverse applications and technologies.

Conclusion

E2E testing allows you to significantly decrease risks and ensure that your key business processes work as expected.

Whether you're a Product Owner or a QA Manager, you can breathe easier knowing your critical user journeys are working as expected.

With E2E testing, you’re not just validating processes—you’re building confidence and reliability in your business.

Build out your E2E strategy with our Test Automation Strategy Checklist: