E028 - Testing Series Part 4 - Protractor

In the conclusion of our four-part series on testing in Angular, we sat down with Keen Yee Liau. Keen leads the tooling team as part of the Angular Team at Google. Externally, the tooling team ships the Angular CLI, which includes the out-of-the-box end-to-end testing tool called Protractor. Join panelists Aaron Frost, Brian Love, and Jennifer Wadella as we learn from Keen about the current direction of Protractor.

The recently released version 7 of Protractor focused solely on security issues, resulting in the necessity to update dependencies, leading to a major release bump. If you've been using Protractor for some time, you might be asking, "Wait, what happened to version 6?" Well, v6 was a release-to-evaluate webdriver version 4 (still in alpha) and was never released, and likely won't ever be released. It goes down as a fun bit of history along with Angular version 3.

Keen shared with the panelists how the tooling team (and the Angular team at large) is reflecting on the strategy and direction of Angular and the tooling infrastructure. Keen and his team are evaluating the landscape of testing, both within Google and broadly within the ecosystem. Given the current evaluation, make no mistake, Protractor is widely used within Google, and the tooling team is committed to supporting and improving Protractor for the 1,100 + Angular applications at Google as well as the thousands of applications in the community that use Protractor for end-to-end testing. The Angular Team is committed to not leaving anyone behind in the story of Angular. Rest assured, this includes projects that use Protractor. But Keen is also looking for feedback from YOU! His DMs are open at @liauky. We look forward to the future of testing Angular applications!