Learning targets 🧠
In this video, you will see how to:
- Calculate test and app coverage in mabl
- Review link crawler test output
- Improve and strengthen coverage
Review our documentation: Test Coverage
Why is this important?
Our Coverage feature allows you to understand your application’s test coverage and easily identify potential gaps in your testing.
What is it?
Test Coverage measures how much of your application feature set is exercised by tests.
Getting started
Where to find test coverage
You'll first notice Test coverage on the Home page as soon as you get logged into mabl. The coverage percentage displayed here includes coverage across all application pages within your workspace.
Clicking the coverage card from the Home page or clicking the Coverage page from the left hand navigation bar will take you to the detailed page where you can drill into coverage and metrics by individual application.
How the link crawler works
For each application you configure in mabl, a default free plan “Check all pages for broken links and errors” will be enabled to run on a daily basis. The plan includes a single test “Visit all linked pages within the app”.
The test starts at the application base URL and then moves onto the first hyperlink and visits that page, and continues through subsequent hyperlinks to visit additional pages. As we navigate through pages in your application, we're tracking which pages have tests hitting them. We record other information including number of tests, steps, assertions, complexity, linked pages, and depth.
Note: If you’ve provided credentials for a given application, mabl will use those to log into the site. By default, mabl includes the auto-login flow; however, you can copy the test and add a custom login flow if needed (learn more of how to do that here).
Coverage results
Using the results of the link crawler and tests against an application, we give you a breakdown on the Coverage page.
The gauge chart shows the percentage of pages with test coverage, and the visual chart shows the number of covered and total URLs visited per day over the last two weeks.
As mabl visits each page, it’s collecting information including the following measures. The data shown is based on the timeframe you are filtering on (2 weeks, 1 week, 3 days, 1 day)
- Performance: average speed index to load a page.
- Tests: number of unique tests that execute against the page
- Steps: number of distinct test steps that run against the page.
- Assertions: number of distinct assertions on the page
- Complexity: number of interactive elements on the page
- Linked: number of distinct pages linking to this one
- Users (*only visible if Segment integration is enabled) - average daily number of unique users that visit the page.
Exclusions & URL clustering
You may not care to include all pages in your coverage metrics... you can configure exclusions of paths that should be ignored when calculating coverage metrics.
Mabl uses this cool technique called URL-clustering to group dynamic URLs of pages.
Many apps have dynamic URLs that include random IDs and distinct URLs that describe similar pages. We analyze the distinct URLs and combine those that appear to be the same type of page.
The total page and the covered page count you see reflected on the Coverage page is based on the number of clustered pages instead of the distinct URLs.
By having fewer total pages, you can more easily scroll through and digest the Coverage metrics.
How to use coverage information
We recommend:
- Reviewing high traffic pages lacking comprehensive coverage
- Search on heavily used URLs and review the Tests, Steps, and Assertions columns to identify pages that are lacking coverage.
Side note: Take the guesswork out of which pages you should pay more attention to by setting up the Segment integration!
Segment helps you understand your live user behavior and easily track the number of users interacting with each page in your application. After setting up the Segment integration, sort the Users column in descending order to quickly identify high traffic pages.
Review pages that are heavily linked to your application. Sort the Linked column in descending order and review which may need additional coverage.
Be mindful of Performance as well! You can sort the Performance column in descending order to identify pages that have been slow to load in recent tests.
Mabl makes it easy for you to initiate a new test directly from the Coverage page.
- Click anywhere on the page row and a window will open displaying existing tests that are visiting this page.
- Click the NEW TEST button and Voila! You're on your way to creating a new test.
