Description:
This project aims to enhance the current existing end-to-end (E2E) testing framework by adding tracing and tracking capabilities. The goal is to give developers and testers full visibility into the system’s behavior during test execution. To achieve this, it’s necessary to plan to embed monitoring tools and trace collection mechanisms into the test infrastructure. This will enable capturing, analyzing, and validating every interaction across the entire stack—from frontend interfaces to backend services.
By enabling real-time observability, the new framework will make it easier to inspect data flows, follow the sequence of operations, detect unexpected behaviors, and verify that tests are both complete and accurate. Tracing will also help to track performance metrics, ensuring system responsiveness and also ensuring that resource efficiency remains within acceptable limits.
The system will need to handle a mix of user interface interactions and API communications (HTTP/gRPC), providing full-stack coverage from user input to service response.
Why This System is Needed
Modern applications are complex, often composed of distributed services, asynchronous processes, and multiple interaction layers. Standard E2E testing approaches typically only verify whether a flow passes or fails and offer little insight into how the system behaved during execution. This lack of visibility leads to several problems, including, first, it will be time-consuming to diagnose the actual cause of a test failure. Second, there are some unexpected behaviors that may go unnoticed while not causing test failures. Third, performance issues or inefficient flows are harder to detect until they affect users.
This lack of visibility leads to several key problems. For example, diagnosing the actual cause of a test failure becomes time-consuming, and unexpected behavior that doesn’t cause test failures may still go unnoticed. Performance issues or inefficient flows are harder to detect until they affect users.
Without traceability, it’s also difficult to validate whether tests are truly covering all intended operations, especially when working with microservices or event-driven architectures.
By integrating tracing into the E2E lifecycle, this project will help to ensure that all critical paths are exercised and validated, catching silent failures or deviations from expected behavior, detecting performance bottlenecks, and also supporting faster debugging and more informative test audits.
How We Plan to Achieve It
To deliver this solution effectively, the work will be divided into four structured phases:
1. Requirements Analysis and Research
Determining which systems, protocols, and layers require tracing, such as REST, gRPC, WebSockets, and frontend. Then, evaluate tracing tools (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin) and compatible testing frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, Jest, Postman). Complete these by defining key metrics: operation sequences, response times, and trace completeness, and determine how test runs will be linked to traces (via trace IDs, session tags, etc.).
2. System Design
In this phase, it’s needed to design the architecture for test-trace integration. Define a trace schema and determine how/where traces will be stored. Plan integration points between the test runner and the tracing backend. Create utilities for tagging and correlating traces to specific test runs. Establish thresholds and benchmarks for validating performance within tests.
3. Framework Implementation
In this phase, instrument the application layers to emit trace data (frontend, backend APIs, services). Extend E2E tests to initiate and associate with trace sessions. Develop utilities to validate execution order and completeness via trace logs. Implement dashboards or log exporters for inspecting traces visually. Add performance assertions directly into the test logic (e.g., “API X must respond in <200 ms”).
4. Testing, Verification, and Documentation
At last, execute test cases across the full system to validate trace coverage and accuracy. Build a library of sample traces for baseline comparisons. Run performance and stress tests while observing trace data for bottlenecks. Document the trace validation process, integration steps, and known issues. Provide training material for developers and QA teams to interpret and work with traces effectively.
Project Timeline
- Requirements Analysis and Research: 40-50 hours
- System Design: 80–90 hours
- Framework Implementation: 100–120 hours
- Testing, Verification, and Documentation: 50-60 hours
Total Time Frame: 270-320 hours