Getting Started with Front End Testing

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Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:

  1. Linting (There’s ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint and/or Prettier for CSS.)
  2. Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we’ve covered Axe.)
  3. Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we’ve covered Percy.)
  4. End to End Testing (There’s Cypress and stuff like jest-puppeteer.)

Amy published something similar over on 24 ways, listing out 12 different testing tools.

As long as we’re being comprehensive, we might consider performance testing to be part of all this, ala SpeedCurve or Calibre to mention some web services.

I’ve liked what Harry Roberts has said lately about performance budgets. They don’t need to be fancy; they just need to prevent you from bad screwups.

[…] most organisations aren’t ready for challenges, they’re in need of safety nets. Performance budgets should not be things to work toward, they should be things that stop us slipping past a certain point. They shouldn’t be aspirational, they should be preventative.

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