Last night I continued what looks like it’ll be my traveling show for 2014 – I was preaching the gospel of testing in JavaScript at BrookylnJS, who were kind enough to invite me up to Brooklyn for coworking during the day and speaking in the evening (the first rough, see-if-it-sticks 8 minute run of this topic was at Net/Work Philly).
You can see the deck over here on GitHub, repo here (reveal.js, demos folder has sample stuff for Jasmine (the standalone) and Mocha).
I’ve already got some good feedback (such as adding tap and removing Vows, as emphatically suggested by Brian). I’ll be doing another version of this talk at QCon and MidwestJS, respectively (modified for those audiences), so come see me talk if those are of interest to you/close to your part of the world.
I’ll probably write some more about testing this summer, there’s just so much to say. It’s amazing to me to still talk to people who say the “testing takes too much time!” party line. I’m very happy to work at a place that places a lot of value on being a testing practitioner, and is seeking ways to do it better.
Talking to another enthusiastic testing person last night, we were both saying one of the reasons we’re fanatics about testing is that we’ve seen the improvements it’s helped us make in our coding. That it helps you be able to walk away from a project for 6 months and come back and some ability to change code without fear that it will break anything. That’s just some of the value of testing. Find the reason that works for you (TDD as a design strategy, for example, if you like that), and go with it.