4 quick lessons on the philosophy of testing

Testing is an area of front-end development that has improved rapidly in the last few years, but there it can still feel overwhelming.

Tools like Mocha, Jasmine and Jest have made writing tests far easier…

But there’s still a gap. It’s extremely hard to find information on the philosophy of testing. What to test and why. How much is enough? What type of tests should I be writing, and when does it fit into my process?

There are a few great articles out there. I really like this one by Max Kanat-Alexander and while I’m not personally a practitioner of TDD I found this article on how TDD fits into a broader system to be enlightening.

But there aren’t many.

That’s why when I recently had a conversation with Christopher Hiller (maintainer of Mocha) and Nick Nisi on JSParty #70 that ended up talking a lot about testing philosophy, I thought it would be worth pulling out some of the key points. Here they are:

1. Testing best practices change over the lifespan of your project

I think this is one of the biggest sources of conflict and confusion about testing — the best practices change a lot depending on what your project looks like and what stage it is in!