Testing as an art

[ryanyogan]

This seems to be one of the most opinionated topics (and misunderstood) in UI Engineering from my perspective. Many shops have a very different view on how to test the UI. Be it following the *DD flavor of the year to manual vs. automation.

I know there is a "Unit Testing" episode however I would love to hear more about the whole package if you will.

• I would love to hear the opinions of the "hot potato" that is React's SDK (CLI) choosing Jest as the tool of choice.
• Who prefers writing tests first for isolated "pure components," whilst deferring integration / regression testing for the mutations (any form of I/O)?
• What testing frameworks does your team use and why?
• Do you prescribe to the school of thought "I manually test with a real time feedback loop via the browser using HMR, auto page reloads, etc... later I will write my tests once I am happy with what I see?"
• Being very data driven individuals, what is your take on A/B testing, is it something you wrap into your feature story? Is A/B testing something you tack on after the feature is complete?
• Do you think mocks / stubs are evil and must be destroyed? If you do use them, where do you draw the line for them to be considered harmful; if ever?
• Everyone loves React (and the ecosystem), however we also have Ember, Angular, Cycle, Vue, Om, and a plethora of other abstractions / frameworks. Do you feel certain frameworks adopt testing better than others from a community perspective?
• I believe manual testing is an art and must never be displaced completely in favor of test automation. We cannot predict every edge case, opening the browser and beating the crap out of what we have built can really cause grey hairs yet may save your team from long winded peer reviews. Do you manually test your UI as you are building features or do you leave this to QA?
• Jasmine / QUnit still work, they may not be the flavor of the week but they do follow a very simple paradigm. Do you prefer going with the community or what you personally have a strong grasp on?