As a followup to my last post - a description of how I test my work.

What do you need out of a webapp test suite

Must haves:

• Run tests in a real browser
• Inspect test state using a debugger to track down the reason for failures

Nice to have:

• Run your entire suite fast (See next post)
• When you save a spec file, it runs and pops up a notification with the result (See next post)
• When you save a code file, it runs the associated test and pops up a notification with the result
• Run specific tests

Setting up the basics

To get started testing, I’ve found jasmine.js is pretty awesome. You should be able to get up and running with it fairly quickly; I’ve found the following approach works well:

• Write a hello world spec that has one failing and one passing test
• Put it in spec/jasmine/hello_world_spec.coffee
• I’ve got a very simple spec_controller.rb, which
  • Is only available when RAILS_ENV is development
  • Serves up an html page with
    • jasmine and jasmine-html
    • All the javascript for my app (except the application starter file)
    • Test-specific css styles
    • DOM fixtures
    • The actual test

• Here’s the html.erb template I use:

• Serve spec files out of /spec when your app is in development mode.
• Run specs by visiting http://localhost/spec?spec_file=hello_world_spec
• You can now run the specs manually; a good start
• I use a capybara script in a rake task to run the specs in CI.

Next time

• How to set up phantomjs, autotest (with growl/libnotify) to run your tests
• My textmate bundle for jasmine / coffeescript development