Testing Fundamentals

This comprehensive course from Frontend Masters provided me with a solid foundation in software testing principles and practical skills for implementing robust testing strategies in frontend applications.

I learned a lot about the different types of testing and how to implement them in my projects.

The importance of testing in software development

The end goal of testing is not 100% test coverage but it's about getting rid of that feeling of existential dread when go to refactor your code

We have to invest in testing our code automatically for future refactoring. It's going to take a while at first but it's worth it.

What I learned

We use vitest and playwright for this course, so it's very simple and easy to get started.

I learned about testing basics, like:

• Anatomy of a test
• Testing Guidelines
• Testing for Invalid Inputs
• Testing for Edge Cases

He also taught me about testing equality, and how to use the toBe, toEqual, and etc.

I learned about Testing DOM with vitest and testing library in React JS Components. It's very simple testing since it's just a DOM Virtual, there's no actually a browser running.

There is also a clear comparison between stubs, spies, and mocks in the course. These are fake methods and values that you can use so that you can pin down the thing you’re actually trying to test.

• Stub -> a fake method that returns a fixed value.
• Spy -> a real method that watches how it's used.
• Mock -> a fake method that must be used a certain way.

I even learned about End-to-End Testing with Playwright. It's a very powerful tool that allows you to test your application as a user would.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the course and I learned a lot. I'm going to use these skills in my projects and I'm going to continue to learn more about testing since it is seperates between junior and senior developers.