support more browsers in automated integration tests
This question came up in the Coko/NCBI team chat.
...a question relevant to all end-to-end tests on client side, can we document a global rule about which browsers we will support for BCMS (also for tests)? I would propose these that we know our users use: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari
Coko does this for tests at the moment:
- When the QA team runs the tests locally on each "in development" branch, this is done in Chrome, Firefox.
- When the tests are automated through the pipeline, this is done in Chrome only.
We did some investigation:
- Safari is not supported by cypress yet for running tests in ci pipelines.
- Edge was not supported with the cypress docker image we were using, but we updated to a new version which supports it.
We could do Safari checks manually, but this additional workload would affect how much work can be done in each iteration. We could configure the pipeline to run tests on additional browsers, and limit these to run on merges to the staging branch only, however this too slows us down (roughly ~30 mins per browser per MR).
At this time, considering the tight timeline in the contact, our recommendation is to stick to our current approach and review the pipelines changes in a new contact phase.