Despite constantly changing technologies and the needs of customers, some wisdom seems eternal. Programmers need to test their code. But thorough test

Effective Testing in JavaScript

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2024-05-09 02:00:09

Despite constantly changing technologies and the needs of customers, some wisdom seems eternal. Programmers need to test their code.

But thorough testing takes time. When we do it well, everything works, and a massive testing effort feels like a waste. However, when we do it badly, our code is often broken, and we wish that we had done better testing.

I have some good news for you. Testing doesn’t have to be arduous and we can still get good results. Part of it comes down to our attitude: come at it the right way and it will be much easier.

Another part of it is the techniques we use. In this blog post, I’ll show you some testing techniques (with code examples on GitHub) that can deliver much more bang for your buck.

But that’s not enough. To be more effective, we must catch bugs early. The earlier we find them, the cheaper they are to fix. When a bug goes out to production and is found by a customer, then it’s a whole lot more expensive to get it reported, reproduced, and handed off to a developer — and they probably then have to spend time loading the mental context they need to find and fix it.

Testing enables refactoring. Evolution allows good design to emerge naturally through repeated refactoring and simplification, but we can’t do that safely without testing.