Meteor and the state of testing

I’m working on a project at the moment and I’ve been asked to introduce some testing. I have a few questions.

  1. Is the state of Meteor testing at a point where investing hours learning about it will pay off yet?
  2. How capable is it?
  3. Should I be using velocity?
  4. Which frameworks should I use?
  5. What are the best resources for learning?

I’ll be using the responses of this post to decide whether or not I should attempt to introduce testing to my project or whether I should try to explain that testing in Meteor is "not quite ready yet but I hope I won’t have to do that.

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I believe every piece of software should have testing, and if you have done testing in other web frameworks, you might find it to be very similar.

For myself, I use sanjo:jasmine with the velocity html reporter. You can use the jasmine introduction guide to get you started. Also, you can look at my github code to see how I used testing in meteor.

Learning jasmine isn’t too bad, and it applies to more frameworks than just meteor.

I’ve just starting testing a fairly complex Meteor package I’ve been writing and have found the process to be well worthwhile. Even though I only had a very limited set of tests written, they caught a bunch of errors that I wouldn’t otherwise have spotted during a recent refactor. I’m using sanjo:jasmine with the velocity html reporter.

I’ve also dabbled with xolvio:cucumber and, although I don’t have much of a clue about how to get the best out of it, I can see that it will be pretty awesome for BDD. This tutorial is fantastic. I’d really like to see a bunch of cucumber tests written for a simple app (like the leaderboard and/or todos app) – anyone know of something like this?

Based on my fairly limited experience:

  1. I think Meteor testing is definitely at the stage where investing the hours of learning is worthwhile.

  2. I’m quite impressed with the velocity project and how much easier it makes testing. I don’t have much past experience to compare it with, but I’ve found the testing capabilities of the packages mentioned above to cover everything I need.

  3. I think velocity gives you a really good leg-up into testing. Personally, I need to see a few more examples of testing done well, but I think that’s just a case of me having to go looking around the Meteorverse a bit.

  4. I’ve found sanjo:jasmine and xolvio:cucumber with the velocity html reporter to be pretty handy. For other frameworks, I know that @awatson1978 has done some serious work with starrynight for industrial strength testing, but I don’t know too much else about it.

  5. The post I mentioned above got me up and running with xolvio:cucumber and I was lucky enough to have someone else bootstrap a test suite for my package using sanjo:jasmine. I find that looking at tests for code I’m familiar with to be the quickest way to learn patterns and syntax.

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So is sanjo:jasmine current? I remember playing around with it many months ago but when I tried to install it today I can’t even get the package to install, even in a freshly created app. Just dies with an exception out of future.js. Maybe there’s some undoc prerequisite I’m missing?

[update] I solved the problem with adding the package by reinstalling meteor. Not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner. It had been at least a couple of days since the last reinstall but it wasn’t exhibiting the usual symptoms of needing a reinstall.

Anyway, now I’ve got velocity going with jasmine. Looks much more refined than the last time I tried it.

Velocity has many rough edges.
However it uses some standards (jasmine, cucumber, selenium…), so your investment is not lost.