Thoughts about software development

Every now and then I do some research on browser testing. More specifically I try to find and evaluate what kind of ready to use solutions or libraries have emerged since my previous research or if some of the previously tested solutions has come up with something new. Back in September 2017 I had some extra time on my hands and I used a couple of days to see what are the new and interesting solutions at that time. I came across some tools that I have used in the past and found two new interesting options in which one stood out. Say hello to TestCafe The most interesting solution that I found was called TestCafe . It's a open source Node.js library from a company called Developer Express Inc. They also have a commercial product called TestCafe ( confusing ) which I haven't tried as the open source library provided everything I was interested in and it seemed to be under active development . The thing that caught my interest at first was that this library doesn't depen...

Recently I joined a project that was built on node.js and views were generated via jade templates. The node.js backend had a few very basic tests in the form of unit tests and frontend didn't have any tests. One of my tasks was to improve the test coverage. Following is a short description of the problem and a example solution how I resolved it. Unit testing I started by going through the existing tests and refactoring those so that they worked as expected and added tests for the functionality I had implemented previously. These tests were run via mocha.js and utilized chai.js and supertest . These were very mainly unit tests except for the one's that utilized supertest which tested that the web application responded correctly to very basic http requests to routes like / or /login . I want more In a previous project that I worked in we had mocha tests that were run in a browser so that it tested the running application within a iframe via mocha. I always liked t...

Everybody has their favorite when it comes to cars, sports or jeans and the same goes for work tools. Some prefer OS X over Linux or Maven over Gradle and don't even get me started on browser wars. I've had my share of trying out different tools to choose the ones I want to use but every now and then I change some of my tools. This time I'm telling what my day to day tools currently are and why I changed one of them. The solid foundation When I get to choose my tools there's one solid foundation that works as a base for all other tools. This has been my number one choice for over ten years with a little variety over time. Linux. No question about it, I've used for years, I know my way around it and it offers everything I need in work and at home. The variety comes from different distributions and desktop environments although those have also been very stable for the past four or five years, Debian has the stability I want and XFCE offers everything I need fr...