the state of frontend testing

👋 Hi there, thank you for your time. I am trying to understand the state of frontend testing with web applications. The survey is anonymous and should take about ~3 minutes to fill out. No sales follow-up unless you opt-in.

Let's go! 🚀

Which statement best describes your role?

A

Founder / CTO (hands-on coding)

B

Front-end engineer

C

Back-end engineer

D

Full-stack engineer

E

Dedicated QA / SDET

F

Engineering manager / tech lead

G

Other

Roughly how big is your engineering team?

A

1-5

B

6-15

C

16-40

D

41+

How often do you deploy to production?

A

Multiple times a day

B

Daily

C

Weekly

D

Less than weekly

Briefly describe your tech stack

Briefly walk me through the last meaningful front-end test you wrote or updated

Thinking about the last feature you shipped, what was the rough split between writing feature code vs writing tests?

A

Mostly feature work >80% shipping, <20% on tests

B

Feature-heavy — 60% shipping / 40% tests

C

Even split — 50% shipping and tests

D

Test heavy — more than half of my time goes in writing / fixing tests

E

Not certain — can vary a lot week to week

How painful do you find writing frontend tests in your current codebase?

Things you’ve already tried or rely on to speed up testing (select all that apply)

A

Rely more on manual QA / vibe testing

B

Copilots in IDEs (cursor, github, windurf)

C

Generate tests with code-gen tools (e.g. Playwright codegen, Cypress Studio)

D

Snapshot or visual-diff tests instead of DOM assertions (likes of percy, etc)

E

Reduced test coverage to critical / happy paths only

F

At times, skipping frontend tests altogether to prioritise moving fast

G

I have more to say

In the last while, how often have UI bugs slipped through your test suite and reached production?

A

Never or very rarely, our test coverage is solid

B

I can recall at least a few times, but it's not an issue

C

Happens all the time, we really need to improve our coverage

D

I have more to say

In the last while, has your test suite slowed down your ability to ship? (select all that apply)

A

Not really — writing tests is fairly quick, and we include the time it takes in our estimates

B

Not really — we don't write a lot of tests, but rely on manual QA

C

A bit — writing tests is a pain, but not a significant time sink

D

Significantly — to the point where we prefer not to write tests at all

E

I have more to say

On a scale of 10, how confident are you that your frontend tests catch critical bugs before deploy?

Which tools are in your current test suite?

One last thing, would you be interested in supporting me further?

A

Yes, sure

B

Not at this time

	Decent	Mildly painful	Very painful
New unit / component test from scratch
New end-to-end / integration tests
Updating existing tests
Working with data-test selectors
Mocking network calls or child components
State management in tests
Diagnosing a flaky test that fails only in CI