Chapter 14
Unit Testing with QUnit
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- An Introduction to Unit Testing
- Getting Started with QUnit
- Asynchronous Testing
- Putting It All Together
In this chapter, you learn about the benefits of unit testing and about the specific unit testing framework created and used by the jQuery project itself, QUnit. You learn how to write your own tests and how to integrate QUnit with your own projects to increase code quality, maintainability, and overall confidence.
AN INTRODUCTION TO UNIT TESTING
If you’re coming to jQuery and JavaScript engineering from some other programming discipline, the concept of unit testing is likely familiar to you. If that’s the case, or you’re among the minority of front-end engineers already doing unit testing, feel free to skip ahead to the sections that deal specifically with unit testing with QUnit. Otherwise, read on and learn about the benefits of a development approach centered on a structured, atomic testing framework.
As a note, this is an area of front-end engineering where there’s an opportunity to get ahead of the curve. As the DailyJS JavaScript Developer Survey 2011 Results (http://dailyjs.com/2011/12/15/javascript-survey-results/) show, only 42 percent of JavaScript engineers are unit testing their code. That number is up from 2010, but it still shows that there’s a gap between the tools commonly used in other programming disciplines and the ones used in the average JavaScript project.
As you’ll soon see, the benefits are ...
