Cypress Tips January 2026

Many years ago, I spoke at the AssertJS conference (guess the conference main topic!). My two main points were that Cypress end-to-end testing needs:

1. Component testing

2. Automatic analysis of failed vs successful tests

Find the slides here and the video on YouTube. It was a good talk, still slaps.

I did write component testing, which is one skill that if you master, you will never look back.

And now Sebastian Clavijo Suero wrote a plugin that is just 100% pure awesomeness. See cypress-flaky-test-audit repo and read the blog post “CYPRESS-FLAKY-TEST-AUDIT: thriving in the Cypress ‘Dual-Verse’ for once!“. The main idea behind the plugin: capture each test command with its timing. If the test fails and then passes using test retries give you all important information side by side so you can understand why the test might have failed. The plugin can show the command comparison information using DevTools console, terminal, and even HTML report:

Focusing on test retries is the right choice. Tests that passed immediately after failing show the problems with test design, rather than external factors. The test attempts are close temporarily, have the same test code, so the question is mostly of timing.

I wonder how this plugin can help solve my “Cypress Flaky Tests Exercises”, will investigate.

Speaking of Sebastian Clavijo Suero, read his blog post “Cypress.Promise.all() and cy.mapChain(): Two Hidden Gems for Cypress You Won’t Let Go Once You Try Them” (yes, Sebastian is great. No, he isn’t good at writing short titles) to learn about cy.mapChain command from my cypress-map plugin. I guarantee that if you have some gnarly-looking piece of Cypress test code, this plugin can help you rewrite it into short, concise, and elegant version.

You might not like Playwright as much as I do, but it never hurts to know more tools. This is the list of all December “Cy Vs Pw” posts I did, collected here and on my blog for your information.

• Day 1: global vs local variables

• Day 2: The difference in test command syntax

• Day 3: DOM Snapshots vs live application

• Day 4: Where do the end-to-end tests run?

• Day 5: Locators and selectors

• Day 6: Composite locators vs query chains

• Day 7: Comparing the test runner release frequencies

• Day 8: Completing todo items and checking CSS classes

• Day 9: Waiting for page elements

• Day 10: Make a network call before each test to rest the backend data

• Day 11: Using API calls rather than UI to set up the initial test state

• Day 12: Use data from a JSON fixture file in your test

• Day 13: Hovering over an item before deleting it

• Day 14: Checking the text of multiple elements

• Day 15: Waiting for a network call to happen

• Day 16: Check the data sent by the server to the browser

• Day 17: Stub the GET /todos network call

• Day 18: Stub GET and POST /todos network calls

• Day 19: Check the sent Todo object

• Day 20: Comparing the documentation sites

• Day 21: Show test steps a little bit better

• Day 22: Automatic waiting for elements before clicking

• Day 23: Speed up tests by controlling the app’s clock

• Day 24: Component testing

• Day 25: Playwright cannot do sync prop calls in component tests, Cypress can

Happy 2026!