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What's your favorite JS testing framework?

Madza on September 27, 2021

Nowadays, the industry is dominated by agile development and tight deadlines. Manual unit testing can be complex and time-consuming, so it makes se...

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Madza • Mar 24 '22

Thanks for the valuable insight 💯👍✨

Ben Halpern • Sep 27 '21

We use Jest, and I've been pretty happy with it overall. I'm not so deep into this type of work any more, but every time I need something I find it easy enough to follow along with what I'm seeing in the files and/or find useful docs and guides.

Madza • Sep 27 '21

I still remember reading your post on the DEVs tech stack and I was impressed seeing all the pieces working together so well 😉
Jest has proven itself as a solid framework, with lots of devs trusting it.
According to npmtrends:

Ben Halpern • Sep 27 '21

We've since simplified the tech stack a little bit, but yes we have had a focus on maintaining a good test suite and having the tools that support stability as much as we can.

peerreynders • Sep 28 '21 • Edited

Slow Tests

The tests take long enough to run that developers don't run them every time they make a change to the system under test (SUT). They wait until the next coffee break or other interrupt before running them. Or, whenever they run the tests they walk around and chat with other team members (or play Doom or surf the Internet or ...)

i.e. your test runner shouldn't be part of the problem - that's why uvu exists.

Madza • Sep 28 '21

This is insightful, thanks 👍😉

Full Name • Sep 29 '21 • Edited

I use tape for most purposes. Simple, lightweight, works as well today as it did years and years ago. It's also very similar to Rust's built-in test runner, so when I move between languages the context switch is that much lighter.

I also personally dislike the bdd test style (thus I wouldn't use a framework that only provides that option, assuming the choice is mine). Not for any technical reasons that actually matter, just personal taste. So much noise for the same results.

Madza • Sep 29 '21

Thanks for the input 👍😉

Mage AI • Sep 30 '21

We use React on our frontend, so Jest and Enzyme are our preferred JS testing frameworks. Since these are quite popular, there are also a lot of great resources out there on using them, and Jest is even recommended in React's docs.

Siddharth • Sep 28 '21

Jest for now, though I'm building my own!

I try to build my own <everything>. I'm building my own framework, my own ghost, my own programming language, etc.

Madza • Sep 28 '21

Awesome to hear, best of luck in you projects 👍😉

Frédéric Bonnet • Sep 29 '21

For unit tests my favorite combo is Mocha/Chai, plus Sinon if I need mocks (though it's rarely the case for unit testing). For dev E2E I'm a big fan of CodeceptJS, far superior to Cypress IMHO.