Mastering React Test-Driven Development

Debugging in the browser

For the TDD practitioner, debugging should – in theory – be a very rare experience, or at least something that is actively avoided. In practice, however, you will need these skills from time to time.

A downside of TDD is that your debugging skills suffer. Debuggers are complex and highly sophisticated pieces of software.

Print-line debugging is the name given to the debugging technique where a codebase is littered with console.log statements in the hope that they can provide runtime clues about what's going wrong. I've worked with many programmers who began their careers with TDD; for many of them, print-line debugging is the only form of debugging they know. Although it's a simple technique, it's also time-consuming, ...