LinLog

Today I watched a very interesting talk on good and bad unit testing practices by Roy Osherove, entitled "Unit Testing Good Practices & Horrible Mistakes in JS".  It really was an exceptional talk, with some good, concrete advice and examples.  I highly recommend it.

I actually recognized a couple of the examples in the talk.  The big one was OpenLayers.  I still remember being horrified by their test suite when I was using that library at my last job.  We had a number of extensions to OpenLayers and I was thinking about adding some tests into their test suite.  Then I ran the tests and saw a bunch of failures.  Assuming our code must be bad, I tried a fresh copy of the OpenLayers release.  A bunch of tests still failed.  And that's when I gave up and decided to just pretend their tests didn't exist.

If nothing else, the talk provided some nice validation that my JavaScript unit testing practices aren't completely wrong and stupid.  I've been writing unit tests for my JavaScript as part of my standard process for the last six months or so, and I was actually watching the video waiting for the hammer to drop, for Roy to describe an anti-pattern that I'd been blissfully propagating.  I was pleased and somewhat surprised when that moment didn't come.