netzpirat's comments

netzpirat | 14 years ago | on: Integration testing Backbone.js

Jasmine is used for unit testing and you should mock dependencies like faking XHR requests, whereas with Capybara/Selenium you do acceptance tests to test the frontend/backend integration.

netzpirat | 14 years ago | on: Poll: Do you test your code?

At first I was doubtful about testing my JS code, but nowadays I do enjoy it much more that testing the Rails backend. I use my own gem guard-jasmine that runs the specs headless on PhantomJS and it's a real joy! My whole spec suite with over 1000 specs runs in under 3 seconds. I use SinonJS for faking AJAX calls to the backend, but that's just a small subset of all specs since most stuff isn't interacting with the backend.

netzpirat | 14 years ago | on: Poll: Do you test your code?

I do test almost anything in my apps and I can't imagine to write my software without it nowadays. I test my Ruby code in the backend, the CoffeeScript code in the frontend and I have integration tests to verify that the whole stack works fine.

It took me a lot of effort to learn it properly, I have read many books about testing, have read the tests of plenty of open source software to see how others do it and I wrote thousands of wrong tests until I got at a stage where I can say I have mastered testing.

I was always fascinated about test driven development, but to be honest, it does not work for me and I seldom do it. In most cases I normally write new functionality, then I describe the behavior of it and finally do some refactoring until the code quality meet my needs. When you can refactor a class without breaking a single test, you know you've done it right.

It's important that you find your way and don't try to follow the rules from others. Take your time, mastering software testing is a complex discipline and it won't happen overnight.

Even with a high level of test coverage, I always encounter new bugs when using the software. But after fixing it and adding some tests, I know at least that I will not see the exact same bug again.

I believe that writing tests speeds up my development. This may seems illogical at first, but without the tests my development would slow down with increasing complexity (Lehman's Law), and instead of adding new functionality I'd find myself fixing old stuff. So testing allows me to manage a large and complex codebase, it allows me to do a complicated architectural refactoring and I know everything important still works as expected.