Test-Driven JavaScript Development

Chapter 1. Automated Testing

As web developers it is easy to find ourselves in situations where we spend unhealthy amounts of time with the refresh button in our browsers. You know the drill: type some code in your text editor, Alt+Tab to the browser, hit F5. Lather, rinse, repeat. This sort of manual testing is time-consuming, error-prone, and irreproducible. Given that our web applications are expected to run on a vast combination of browsers and platforms, testing them all manually will inevitably become an impossible task. So we focus on a few combinations and perform the occasional check-up on the broader selection. The end result is an unsatisfactory development process and possibly brittle solutions.

Over the years lots of tools have ...