This repository is a demonstration of how to use Test Driven Development with Javascript.

Test Driven Development is software development process that relies on the repetion of a very short development cycle: first you write a test, watch your tests fail, then refactor your code until the tests pass. This test-first process is repeated until the application is complete.

There are many different Javascript TDD frameworks, including:

• qUnit (of jQuery fame)
• CommonJS assert module specification
• jSpec

For this demonstration I'll be using qUnit as it has a nice browser based test runner. The same concepts should apply to other frameworks as well.

I'm also going to assume that you're reasonably familiar with Javascript. If you aren't I highly recommend these excellent books to get you started:

• Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
• JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov
• Javascript: The Definative Guide by David Flanagan
• jQuery in Action: Second Edition by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz

To get started we've downloaded qUnit and created a simple scaffolding.

Clone this repository and reset it to the commit your interested in (in this case the first one, ac3e163395):

$ git clone git@github.com:MarkBennett/IntroToJsTdd.git
$ git reset --hard <commit>

We've now got five files in our directory:

• my_script.js
• test/index.html
• test/tests.js
• test/qunit/qunit.js
• test/qunit/qunit.css

This scaffolding comes straight from the qUnit repo.

To begin try running your tests by opening test/index.html in your browser. If everything worked you should see a clean test runner. When you've got it working move on to the next commit to see how we add a new test.