Advice for E2E testing automation

Hello everyone,

I'm new to this sub, hopefully this is the right place to post about this topic.

I'm a QA engineer and making the transition from manual testing to automated testing. I'm working on test automation for a fairly new product at my company, and would like some advice from more experienced QA engineers about how to get started.

So a little background – at the company I'm working at, testing has been completely manual until now. Not even unit testing. Automated testing is something we are just starting with now.

Now, I am required to write automated E2E test for a dashboard that has its own backend which integrates with a few other projects in our company and other services (such as a database, S3, monitoring). For example, a user can do CRUD actions in this dashboard, that result in items being created / updated / deleted in other systems.

This really stumps me, when it comes to testing, because the results of these scenarios are on another system, and not on the one that under test. How would you approach testing such a system? Is it better off to mock these integrations, and test them through a different method (maybe even manually)? Are there other ways to go about this?

Any advice would be much appreciated 🙂