As there are many different IDE, I feel like Visual studio code is the right one for me for many reasons but the biggest one of all is the number of extensions available to make coding easy.

Below you can find my most helpful VS code extensions as an Automation engineer in no particular order.


The Better Comments extension will help you create more human-friendly comments in your code.
With this extension, you will be able to categorise your annotations into:

Commented out code can also be styled to make it clear the code shouldn't be there

Any other comment styles you'd like can be specified in the settings

Material Icons for all your file extensions. It really makes identifying the files at a quick glance easy and stand out.

Most of the time we create new files that will need to be imported into a parent file, this plugin helps import files much easier by autocompleting filenames.

Fancy screenshots of your code just by selecting it. The screenshot has rounded edges to make it look professional.

Cypress Helper provides shortcuts to navigate between cypress customs. It really comes in handy when debugging through complex code in less time.

If you love working with docker, This plugin is for you. It gives a visual sidebar with details like Containers, Images, Registries, Networks and Volumes. It really comes in handy when you want to know what is happening over your docker environments.

This plugin helps you tell who made the code changes without having to go anywhere. It would even provide you various contributors for a particular file. Simple hover over a line and it tells the code changes made. A lot of amazing git features are bought to your code editor.

This will only apply if you have integrated cucumber to your automation framework, it will simply:

Auto-parsing of feature steps from paths, provided in settings.json

Definitions support for all the steps parts

Document format support, including tables formatting

Multiple programming languages, JS, TS, Ruby, Kotlin etc.

As the name implies, this extension helps you share and collaborate your code among your team in real-time with real-time editing and chat. This helps and boosts teams’ productivity when working on a project.

Prettier is a code formatter compatible with many languages. It beautifies the code block with nice indentations, thus making the code more readable.

Kathy C.

Top 10 Visual Studio Code extensions for Automation Engineers

Cypress basic commands are listed below in no particular order  −

Get single or multiple elements by the locator.

Get the first elements of a particular locator.

It clicks an element in Document Object Model (DOM).

It obtains an element having a specific text. The element can have more than the text and still match.

It is used to create an assertion and is an alias of .should ().

It removes the value from textarea or input.

It removes the browser cookies from an existing domain and subdomain.

It iterates through an array having the property length.

It obtains the descendant elements of a particular locator.

It is used to create an assertion and is an alias of .and ().

It obtains a particular browser cookie by its name.

If you feel like there is a command that should be on this list, please leave a comment below!

Cypress is a fast, easy and reliable testing tool for anything that runs in a browser. It’s becoming more popular choice of a tool than any other. I have collected some of the most common commands I use on a daily bases.

Cypress most common commands

Cucumber is a tool that supports behavior-driven development (BDD). It runs automated acceptance tests written in BDD format. Cucumber provides a way to write tests that anybody can understand, regardless of their technical knowledge. It explains test steps and application behavior in simple English using the Gherkin language. 

Cucumber is an important testing tool for the following reasons:

No longer need to write test scripts in multiple languages such as javascript, Python, Java, etc.

It can be integrated with many Automation tools such as Cypress, Selenium, Ruby on Rails, and other web-based testing tools.

Run the following command to install Cypress locally:

Run the following command to install the Cucumber for Cypress package:

 Add the configuration Cypress environment files

In the spec files extension parameter in the 

 file, make sure to point to the feature files:

Let’s first write this test by just using Cypress:

), enters the username and the password and clicks the “

In Cypress, users can group multiple commands into a single custom command by creating a file called 

Now, use the custom command in the tests:

The above code is written using Cypress. Now, on using Gherkin for Cucumber, the code goes as follows:

I login’, ‘the url is {word}’, and ‘I’m logged in

. So create 3 step definitions. Create a Javascript file inside a directory named as the feature file (

Once this code runs, Cucumber will convert it into Cypress commands. And, that’s how it works.

Till now, we have written all the Cypress test scripts directly in the JavaScript files, but with the integration of Cucumber, the test structure will change, and now the entry points will be the Cucumber feature files.

Top Visual Studio Code extensions for Automation Engineers in 2022

Better Comments

Material Icon

Path Intellisense

Polacode

Cypress Helper

Docker

Git Lens

Cucumber (Gherkin) Full Support

Prettier