QUnit Vs. Jasmine and TDD Vs. BDD

javascript tdd bdd jasmine qunit
Mims H. Wright picture Mims H. Wright · Aug 9, 2013 · Viewed 15.4k times · Source

I've been looking at two libraries for doing unit tests on the front-end.

  • QUnit - http://qunitjs.com/

  • Jasmine - http://jasmine.github.io/

    1. Jasmine is clearly more BDD focused than QUnit although I could see doing BDD with QUnit by describing the tests in a behavior-oriented way. Both of them are able to run assertions on units of code so I think they're both unit tests. Is BDD mutually exclusive from TDD or is it all in how you write it?

    2. Is unit testing necessary if you're doing behavior testing? Seems like if you cover all user stories, you don't really need to know the details of the testable units.

    3. Are there any other testing frameworks you like? Are there other tests besides unit tests that are good for devs to do on the front-end?

Answer

Seb Rose picture Seb Rose · Aug 12, 2013

  1. BDD and TDD are not mutually exclusive. See Liz Keogh's post

  2. Behavior testing should be understandable by business stakeholders. Unit testing is typically intended to be understood by technical team members (developers, testers etc.). For examples of how to make unit tests more readable you should look at the GOOS book (although the examples are Java not Javascript).

    Also, if you try to cover all test paths using BDD, your business people will get bored and stop caring.

  3. Have a look at Cucumber-JS (a port of Cucumber).

Related questions

Using object types with Jasmine's toHaveBeenCalledWith method

I've just started using Jasmine so please forgive the newbie question but is it possible to test for object types when using toHaveBeenCalledWith? expect(object.method).toHaveBeenCalledWith(instanceof String); I know I could this but it's checking the return value …

Read More
What javascript mocking frameworks are people using?

I'm using Jasmine for testing client & server side javascript and need to do some mocking. Has anyone got any suggestions for a good javascript mocking framework?

Read More
TDD / BDD with React.js?

Really not that much information out there on this subject. I gather Jest would be the Facebook recommended test environment and obviously there are plenty of other testing frameworks which is irrelevant as I'm trying to obtain a list of …

Read More