JavaScript

Introduction

Test Driven Development is a big deal in the modern development landscape. This is a concept that we introduced way back in our Fundamentals section with our JavaScript Exercises. The main idea is simply that you start working on your code by writing automated tests before writing the code that is being tested. There are tons of benefits to working like this, all of which will be discussed in the resources below.

There are many test-running systems available in JavaScript: Mocha, Jasmine, Tape and Jest to name a few. Fortunately the syntax for each one is very similar. They all have their own set of special features, but the basic syntax is almost identical, so in the end it doesn’t matter which one you use. In fact, simply picking which library to use for this curriculum has been quite tricky!

This lesson is going to center around Jest. The biggest reasons for this decision are that one of the best resources we’ve found for explaining JavaScript testing uses it and they have fantastic documentation. In the end, writing tests is less about the syntax and more about the TDD philosophy. The most important issues are knowing why we write tests and what we test rather than how.

Assignment