A work-in-progress article
Mocha is our de-facto choice of a testing framework when it comes to testing our applications.
We also chose Chai for assertions.
There are a few test environments we should commence:
- unit tests
- isolated tests
- integration tests
Unit tests are the ones we use to test libraries when developing with TDD/BDD.
Each library should be throughly tested for correct and incorrect behaviour.
We mostly develop each application in a separated, isolated environment, meaning each of those should pass a minimal set of tests predefined to assert a needed behaviour.
Most importantly, if a certain test is meant to be executed in an environment we do not have access to
(ie. a behavior tested depends on a different application we are developing separately),
we should check up on the process.env.NODE_ENV variable and make sure it's not set to integration.
More of that in the next subsection.
Integration tests are a separate type of tests where we include one or more external application that is a
dependency to the currently developed application.
Before starting those type of tests, we must set an environment variable called NODE_ENV to a value integration.
There should also exist a convenience npm script which could then be used with npm run-script test-integration.
Once we have that, we can insert a portion of code at the beginning of each test that is meant to be used for integrations like so:
if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== "integration")
return this.skip()