Testable JavaScript

Chapter 8. Automation

The point of writing testable JavaScript is so that you and your colleagues can easily fix and maintain the code going forward; hence it is a good skill to possess. Writing tests for future versions of the code becomes easy, and this solid foundation makes automation much more effective. Automation ensures that you can write testable JavaScript in a repeatable way as quickly as possible. When considering automation, you must know what to automate, when to automate, and how to automate.

What to Automate

Determining what to automate is easy: automate everything! This includes JSLint and other forms of static analysis, all tests, code coverage reports, application packaging, and application deployment, including rollback, feedback, bug submission, statistics, and bucket or feature testing. Anything you have to do more than once should be automated. Any time you use up front to automate will be more than paid back over the lifetime of your code.

When to Automate

In terms of when to automate, you have three opportunities: while coding, while building, and while deploying. These three points in the software development process all have different requirements, even if some of the tools you use for each process are the same. For instance, the process for deploying your code to test it while under development may be different from the process for deploying the code to production. As much as those two processes should be kept the same, in reality they are different. Deploying ...