Book Image

Test-Driven JavaScript Development

By : Ravi Kumar Gupta
Book Image

Test-Driven JavaScript Development

By: Ravi Kumar Gupta

Overview of this book

Initially, all processing used to happen on the server-side and simple output was the response to web browsers. Nowadays, there are so many JavaScript frameworks and libraries created that help readers to create charts, animations, simulations, and so on. By the time a project finishes or reaches a stable state, so much JavaScript code has already been written that changing and maintaining it further is tedious. Here comes the importance of automated testing and more specifically, developing all that code in a test-driven environment. Test-driven development is a methodology that makes testing the central part of the design process – before writing code developers decide upon the conditions that code must meet to pass a test. The end goal is to help the readers understand the importance and process of using TDD as a part of development. This book starts with the details about test-driven development, its importance, need, and benefits. Later the book introduces popular tools and frameworks like YUI, Karma, QUnit, DalekJS, JsUnit and goes on to utilize Jasmine, Mocha, Karma for advanced concepts like feature detection, server-side testing, and patterns. We are going to understand, write, and run tests, and further debug our programs. The book concludes with best practices in JavaScript testing. By the end of the book, the readers will know why they should test, how to do it most efficiently, and will have a number of versatile tests (and methods for devising new tests) to get to work immediately.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Test-Driven JavaScript Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding behavior-driven development


A very important thing to learn about TDD is that it's not about just testing, but it's more than that. It defines a process and encourages to improve the overall design of a system. We have seen in Chapter 1, Overview of TDD, and Chapter 2, Testing Concepts, that tests written in TDD not only test our projects, but they also act as documentation and are useful in many more ways. But most of the developers tend to take it just for testing and are not able to harness the benefit of TDD beyond that; probably, because the title mentions test in TDD.

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a term introduced by Dan North to address this shortcoming. The terminology used by BDD focuses on the behavioral aspect of the system. In this chapter, you are going to learn about Jasmine in detail and note that the differences in nomenclature of TDD and BDD. Deep down, TDD and BDD would serve the same purpose, but using the vocabulary of BDD gives you a better set...