What is your end-to-end testing strategy?

Direct answer

What a strong answer covers

How it works

The suite is split so that each failure points at one layer. Domain logic on both sides gets unit tests. The API gets integration tests against a real database in a container, exercising serialisation and queries. Contract tests keep frontend expectations and backend responses aligned without running both. A small end-to-end suite runs the browser against the full stack for the journeys that matter commercially, using seeded, isolated test data and stubbed third parties such as payment providers. The end-to-end layer stays small because it is the slowest and the hardest to attribute when it fails.

Example

Sign-up, first purchase, and password reset run end to end in Playwright against a Docker Compose stack with a fake email server and a payment sandbox. Everything else, including the forty pricing rules and the two hundred API validation cases, runs in unit and integration layers that finish in under three minutes on every pull request.

Common mistakes

• Running every scenario through the browser and waiting forty minutes for feedback.
• Sharing one test database between parallel end-to-end runs so tests corrupt each other.
• Mocking the backend in frontend tests so thoroughly that no test ever exercises the real contract.

A useful answer structure

Answer from your own work.

Do not memorise a script: use only examples you can explain honestly in follow-up questions.