That’s not the only way of writing end-to-end tests in Rails. For example, you can use Cypress JS framework and IDE. The only reason stopping me from trying this approach is the lack of multiple sessions support, which is required for testing real-time applications (i.e., those with AnyCable 😉).

This is why for a recent Angular+Rails project we chose to use a testing stack from the backend technology’s ecosystem for e2e testing.

There are times to stretch individually and as a team, but there are also times to take advantage of what you already know.

This meant that we owned both sides of the product implementation. For unit testing on the frontend, we stayed with Angular’s suggestion of Jasmine. For unit testing on the backend, we went with rspec-rails. These worked well since unit tests don’t need to cross technology boundaries.

We used testing tools that were in the same ecosystem as our backend technology stack for primrily three reasons: We owned both ends of the stack Team experience Interacting with the database