start drafting tests

[tan-nate]

addresses #326

Motivation and context

While we continue to work on integrating our tests with Docker, I've enabled us to start drafting tests in the meantime. I added Cypress to 'package.json', made a little tweak to our 'conf/envs/development.js' file, and wrote a quick walkthrough in the README about how to write a simple first test. Hopefully this can serve as a springboard for drafting tests.