datadriven VS ava

Table driven tests are a lot better than a bunch of imperative tests but they rapidly become unwieldy to debug, maintain, and evolve. Their readability often isn’t great.

If you’re using go, check out https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven. It takes a little bit of effort to craft a testing dsl, but it is so worth it.

Also, snapshot style testing where the test writes out its expectations and you just inspect it and save it (part of datadriven) is wonderful.

I’ve been using insta in rust lately and it’s some of what I want but not quite datadriven.

I’ve found the datadriven[1] testing approach in go to be quite effective. The idea is that you leverage a standardized file structure to construct a little DSL for testing your code. This allows you to write expressive tests that print the state of the code and then look at it. Rewrite is also very powerful.

This is all inspired by the sqllite logic test framework.

[1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven

We use Jest Framework for testing. Jest is not a dogma, and, of course, in its place can be any other test runner, such as Mocha or Ava. Let's focus on tests. I'll provide a short example because I don’t want to waste your time. You can find the full version here. It's crucial to read the comments in the code below. Let's go!

> In the popular jest test runner, each test file is executed in its own child process.

Is that confirmed?

I've been following this issue:

https://github.com/jestjs/jest/issues/6957

And what Jest actually does is still kind of muddy.

In contrast to that, other test runners like AVA have a clear description what happens when:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/blob/main/docs/01-writing-tests...

I've been looking at using japa or ava for web server testing but was curious what others were using and why.

Continued work on the test suite. Implementing AVA, with snapshotting. Making a lot of effort to have the snapshot directory structure match the test262 test directory structure by generating AVA test files.

You might want to give ava a spin:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/

It has a TAP reporter, but more importantly, as opposed to the more popular solutions, like Jest, the way it achieves parallelism is explained in the docs and won't change anytime soon, thus preventing wonky, hard to debug errors which occur when this part is abstracted away.

I switched to ava for that reason and have been very happy with it. But vitest looks nice, too. Thanks for the pointer.

Runs unit tests using AVA.

Last but not least important are ava, uvu and tape; they are a really light and fast test runners.

I've had some good experiences with Ava + Sinon. I've personally disliked Jest because it seemed to do some weird trickery in the background that prevented me from using ES modules.

Ava for a simpler environment than Jest, which I usually use. I need to check how to mock ESM with it, though.