12 must-have code testing tools

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New code and user testing tools and frameworks seem to pop up every day. Below is a varied list of code tools that accomplish various testing needs. Each one should be investigated to make sure it fits with your tech stack and technical needs.

01. Jasmine

Jasmine is a behaviour-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code. It doesn't depend on any other JavaScript frameworks and it doesn't require a DOM. However, it does have a clean, obvious syntax so that you can easily write tests.

02. Mocha

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

03. Chai

Chai is a BDD / TDD assertion library for Node.js and the browser that can be delightfully paired with any javascript testing framework.

04. QUnit

QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework. It's used by the jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code.

05. Sinon

Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. It doesn't rely on dependencies, and works with any unit testing framework.

06. Karma

Karma is a framework-agnostic test runner for connected browsers. The results of each test against each browser are examined and displayed via the command line to the developer so they can see which browsers and tests passed or failed.

07. Selenium

Selenium has a straightforward aim: to automate browsers. It is used primarily for automating web applications for testing purposes, but it can just as easily take care of web-based administrative tasks.

08. WebdriverIO

WebdriverIO lets users control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code, making test code simple, concise and easy to read. The integrated test runner also lets you write asynchronous commands in a synchronous way so that you don’t need to care about how to handle a Promise to avoid racing conditions. Additionally, it takes away all the cumbersome set up work and manages the Selenium session for you.

09. Nightwatch

Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser-based apps and websites. It uses the powerful W3C WebDriver API to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements.

10. PhantomCSS

PhantomCSS takes screenshots captured by Casper.js and compares them to baseline images using Resemble.js to test for RGB pixel differences. PhantomCSS then generates image diffs to help you find the cause.

11. PhantomFlow

PhantomFlow delivers UI testing with decision trees. It provides an experimental approach to UI testing, based on Decision Trees. A Node.js wrapper for Phantom.js, Casper.js and PhantomCSS, PhantomFlow enables a fluent way of describing user flows in code while generating structured tree data for visualisation.

12. Percy.io

Percy provides iterative and fast feedback about visual changes, delivering what is calls continuous visual integration. It does this by running with a test suite, taking DOM snapshots, and uploading the, to the Percy service where they are rendered in a modern browser.

This article was originally published in net magazine issue 285.

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