It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
We've been covering performance quite a bit — not just recently, but throughout the course of the year. Now, Harry Roberts weighs in by identifying three types of ways performance can be tested.
Of particular note is the first type of testing:
… Read articleThe first kind of testing a team should carry out is Proactive testing: this is very intentional and deliberate, and is an active attempt to identify performance issues.
This takes the form of developers assessing the performance
Not long ago, I had a novice understanding of Continuous Integration (CI) and thought it seemed like an extra process that forces engineers to do extra work on already large projects. My team began to implement CI into projects and, after some hands-on experience, I realized its great benefits, not only to the company, but to me, an engineer! In this post, I will describe CI, the benefits I’ve discovered, and how to implement it for free, and fast. … Read article
Many people have messaged me, confused about where to get started with testing. Just like everything else in software, we work hard to build abstractions to make our jobs easier. But that amount of abstraction evolves over time, until the only ones who really understand it are the ones who built the abstraction in the first place. Everyone else is left with taking the terms, APIs, and tools at face value and struggling to make things work.
One thing I … Read article
It’s a common situation: you create a site and it’s ready to go. It’s all on GitHub. But you’re not really done. You need to set up deployment. You need to set up a process that runs your tests for you and you're not manually running commands all the time. Ideally, every time you push to master, everything runs for you: the tests, the deployment... all in one place.
Previously, there were only few options here that could help … Read article
End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several pieces of your app at once. It’s a very economical way of testing your app.
Cypress is a new-ish test runner with some features that take some … Read article
Alicia Sedlock, on removing a large section of a website:
... it’s the ultimate “I really hope this doesn’t break something else” situation. It was a stressful and tedious effort of triple checking that the things we were removing weren’t dependencies elsewhere. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any amount of success or confidence without our test suite.
Tests don't just help you when you change code or write new code, then help when … Read article
A common idiom in our industry is, "You never can predict how the user will use your product once they get it in their hands." If you've ever watched a stakeholder use a website or web application for the first time, you may know this firsthand. I can't count the number of times I've seen a user seemingly forget how to use websites on a mobile device, or try to use it in a way that makes you think, "But … Read article
The following is a guest post by Jon Bellah, a Lead Front End Engineer at 10up. Jon reached out to us about writing on the idea of visual regression testing, which is a form of CSS testing (i.e. making sure you don't screw up your site by accident). I thought the use-case was particularly interesting: re-architecting CSS (converting to Sass, splitting up files, etc) and making sure there wasn't regressions during that process. Here Jon will go into … Read article