Testing SockSite: Functional Tests with Node.JS

Background As you may know if you’ve ever browsed my GitHub account, I am a member of a tiny open-source organization called SockDrawer. Odds are, we don’t make anything you’ve heard of; we’re just a group of individuals that all belong to a forum and wanted to make tools to enhance the forum-going experience. SockDrawer began when the founder, Accalia, wanted to make a platform for easily creating bots that interact with up-and-coming forum software Discourse. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 3: Scheduling and reporting

In Part One, we set up a Jenkins server and some unit testing. In Part Two, we added some static analysis tools to our build. But we’re still manually running all this, even if it’s all tied together now. Let’s talk about some of the features Jenkins brings to the table. Building automatically Our code release pipeline is going through some revisions to make better use of branching, so I have the good fortune of being able to detail for you two different build strategies for two different types of branching strategies. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 2: Static Analysis

Part one So. We’re up, we’re unit testing, we’re publishing results. But unit testing is only as good as the tests themselves, and that depends heavily on the programmers’ ability to write good tests. Maybe we want more than that. Maybe we want a metric that isn’t essentially self-reported. Maybe we want static analysis. What is Static Analysis Static Analysis is a category of testing techniques that covers any metric of code that can be collected without executing the code. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 1: Unit Testing

In a lot of ways, the Javascript world feels like it’s trapped in the year 2k: the dot com bubble is swelling huge, and nobody has time for best practices, it’s time to reinvent everything and strike it rich. As an SQA professional, it’s immensely frustrating to outline a technique and be told “Javascript doesn’t do that.” (That’s one of three answers that ought to be banned from a webdev’s vocabulary; the other two are “I think jQuery does that” and “Maybe with Node? Continue reading