Biography

30 years of experience have not dulled the fascination Gil Tayar has with software development. His passion is distributed systems and figuring out how to scale development to big teams. Extreme modularity and testing are the main tools in his toolbelt, using them to combat the code spaghetti monster at companies like Wix, Applitools, and at his current job as software architect at Roundforest.

In his private life, he is a dad to two lovely kids (and a cat), an avid reader of Science Fiction, (he counts Samuel Delany, Robert Silverberg, and Robert Heinlein as favorites) and a passionate film buff. (Stanley Kubrick, Lars Von Trier, David Cronenberg, anybody?)

Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t answered the big question of his life—what’s better, static or dynamic languages? But he’s working on it.

Frontend Testing: Mapping Out the Territory

Frontend testing is impossible! I don’t have time for it! It makes my productivity tank! My manager won’t allow me to do it! These are all excuses for not writing tests for your frontend code. In the interest of time, I will focus on the real reasons – I don’t know how, I’m afraid to start – and alleviate the fear by just writing tests and showing how easy it is.. I will give a recipe that you can follow to ease your fear of the unknown—writing tests. I will discuss the various kinds of testing and how they fit together in a coherent way, but most importantly – we will all exercise and write all the different kinds of tests we learned on a sample application.

• Introduction to testing
• Testing methodologies
• Unit tests using Mocha
• Integration tests using JSDOM
• End to End Browser Automation Tests using Cypress
• Visual Testing using Applitools

Objectives

Write a complete test suite for any frontend application that covers all aspects of frontend applications.

Target audience

Frontend developers and testers that want to write frontend tests along with the developers. Note that JavaScript proficiency is necessary.

Technical requirements

• A Windows, Linux, or MacOS machine with Git, Node.js (versions from 12.x and higher), and preferably Visual Studio Code (although any editor or IDE is OK).