CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I did some investigation of AngularJS's recommendations on testing to see how it might work with Civi. A few thoughts (in no particular order):

1. They recommend implementing tests with Jasmine -- which I haven't used before. I have used qunit.
 * Awesome: Shows up in tutorials, documentation, and other discussions about Angular testing
 * Neutral: At first glance, nothing really stands out as comparatively excellent or terrible with Jasmine -- it just seems different.
 * Weak: We have a qunit tests already -- but not very many. If we adopted Jasmine, we'd probably want to port over the qunit tests.

2. For unit-tests, they recommend http://karma-runner.github.io/0.12/index.html
 * Awesome: Shows up in tutorials, documentation, and other discussions about Angular testing
 * Awesome: Supports concurrent testing in multiple browsers
 * Awesome: Automatic test execution
 * Awesome: Outputting results to file (for use with continuous-integration).
 * Weak: Would take some work to incorporate into buildkit because...
 * Weak: Pure Javascript architecture requires additional tools that aren't in standard LAMP stack
 * Weak: Requires creating more config files with details about local system.
 * Weak: No attention to integration testing -- tests that communicate with server-side are out-of-scope/extra-work

3. For integration tests ("end-to-end / e2e"), they recommend https://github.com/angular/protractor
 * Awesome: Shows up in tutorials, documentation, and other discussions about Angular testing
 * Awesome: Use the same test runtime as karma (ie jasmine)
 * Weak: Use a different test runtime from PHP (ie phpunit) (Can't have it both ways!)
 * Awesome: When I think about testing inside a browser, my brain shifts more naturally into JS than PHP. It's been trained to think that browser==JS.
 * Weak: No way to do assertions with server-side state (eg "did that AJAX call really update the DB? did it really write to a log file? did it really use the mock email service?")
 * Weak: As with karma, the JS bias and extra config files require more work for buildkit.