It was the summer of 2013 and I was working on a project for my employer, Box. I had just finished wiring up JSDoc as a nightly build using a plugin to detect T3 patterns in our code and document them automatically. It occurred to me that these patterns might be easy to get wrong, and I started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. I immediately turned to JSHint because we were already using it and I thought it could support plugins. Unfortunately, it could not.
Still, I couldn’t get the idea of a linter with pluggable runtime rules out of my head. I had just spent a bunch of time learning about Esprima and abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and I thought to myself, “It can’t be all that hard to create a pluggable JavaScript linter using an AST.” It was from those initial thoughts that ESLint was born.
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For many months, your entire team has worked their butts off to create an awesome mobile app. Finally, with your team exhausted and excited, it’s showtime! But then, your dream app turns into the ultimate nightmare: Eager customers download the app, use it once and never return. All the sacrifice and months of hard work — wasted. What went wrong?
Your app has become another victim of the latest trend, joining a whopping 41% of today’s apps that are abandoned after only a single use. This trend has many parallels with the story of the 400-year-old Vasa ship. The most impressive warship of the day, Vasa floundered and sank just one mile into its maiden voyage due to fundamental design issues.
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1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.” Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough.
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Although Windows Phone usage is still low compared with other browsers it’s sometimes necessary to test your web work for Internet Explorer Mobile. For web developers, this could be a complication. Testing for the Windows Phone environment is not always optional, but it can be a chore — especially because the version of Internet Explorer that comes with the Windows Phone can be quirky at best. If you’re a developer without a Windows Phone device, you might have to get a little creative to ensure that your websites are being rendered properly.
In this article I want to point out a few different tools and techniques which can help test websites for Windows Phone even if you don’t have the real device handy or if you are not developing on Windows. But first let’s quickly look into the differences between mobile and desktop Internet Explorer.
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Testing responsive websites is a laborious task. Until now, implementing a stable and maintainable automated solution for cross-browser and cross-device testing of a responsive layout has been nearly impossible. But what if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests?
Upon considering this question, I decided to also look at another interesting side of visual testing. For quite a long time I have been a fan of the test-driven development (TDD) methodology. It helps me in my daily programming work. TDD enables me to formalize the task and to make sure everything is implemented according to the requirements.
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Testing is crucial to ensuring success in the highly competitive landscape of mobile apps and games. But even poorly planned testing can take up 20 to 50% of your total development effort, in which case it would also account for the single biggest cost in your budget. To ensure that testing is extremely efficient, covering the breadth of today’s mobile ecosystems and device models, the best option is an online cloud-based service.
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So, your designers and developers have created a fantastic front-end design, which the client is delighted with, and your job now is to test it. Your heart begins to sink: Think of all the browsers, all the devices and all of these web pages you’ve got to test, not to mention the iterations and bug fixes. You need a front-end testing plan.
This article shows you what to consider when creating a front-end testing plan and how to test efficiently accross browsers, devices and web pages.
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AngularJS has grown to become one of the most popular single-page application frameworks. Developed by a dedicated team at Google, the outcome is substantial and widely used in both community and industry projects.
One of the reasons for AngularJS’ success is its outstanding ability to be tested. It’s strongly supported by Karma (the spectacular test runner written by Vojta Jína) and its multiple plugins. Karma, combined with its fellows Mocha, Chai and Sinon, offers a complete toolset to produce quality code that is easy to maintain, bug-free and well documented.
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People use their mobile devices everywhere: on the train, while waiting in line, sitting on the couch. As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging.
While getting out in the field for user testing is not always realistic, simulating much of that contextual experience in a lab is possible. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design.
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In the early days of mobile, debugging was quite a challenge. Sure, you could get ahold of a device and perform a quick visual assessment, but what would you do after discovering a bug?
With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. For instance, a developer might shrink the size of the desktop browser’s window to test a responsive website or alter the user agent to spoof a particular mobile device.
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