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Jest vs Nightwatchjs: What are the differences?
Jest: Painless JavaScript Unit Testing. Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine; Nightwatchjs: Automated testing and continous integration framework based on node.js and selenium webdriver. Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser based apps and websites. It uses the powerful Selenium WebDriver API to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements.
Jest and Nightwatchjs are primarily classified as "Javascript Testing Framework" and "Browser Testing" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Jest are:
- Familiar Approach: Built on top of the Jasmine test framework, using familiar expect(value).toBe(other) assertions
- Mock by Default: Automatically mocks CommonJS modules returned by require(), making most existing code testable
- Short Feedback Loop: DOM APIs are mocked and tests run in parallel via a small node.js command line utility
On the other hand, Nightwatchjs provides the following key features:
- e2e
- test
- javascript
Jest and Nightwatchjs are both open source tools. It seems that Jest with 26.4K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Nightwatchjs with 9.43K GitHub stars and 927 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Jest has a broader approval, being mentioned in 273 company stacks & 161 developers stacks; compared to Nightwatchjs, which is listed in 16 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.
Postman will be used to do integration testing with the backend API we create. It offers a clean interface to create many requests, and you can even organize these requests into collections. It helps to test the backend API first to make sure it's working before using it in the front-end. Jest can also be used for testing and is already embedded into React. Not only does it offer unit testing support in javascript, it can also do snapshot testing for the front-end to make sure components are rendering correctly. Enzyme is complementary to Jest and offers more functions such as shallow rendering. UnitTest will be used for Python testing as it is simple, has a lot of functionality and already built in with python. Sentry will be used for keeping track of errors as it is also easily integratable with Heroku because they offer it as an add-on. LogDNA will be used for tracking logs which are not errors and is also a Heroku add-on. Its good to have a separate service to record logs, monitor, track and even fix errors in real-time so our application can run more smoothly.
Pros of Jest
- Open source35
- Mock by default makes testing much simpler31
- Testing React Native Apps23
- Parallel test running19
- Fast15
- Bundled with JSDOM to enable DOM testing13
- Mock by default screws up your classes, breaking tests8
- Out of the box code coverage7
- Promise support6
- One stop shop for unit testing6
- Great documentation3
- Assert Library Included2
- Built in watch option with interactive filtering menu1
- Preset support1
- Karma0
- Can be used for BDD0
Pros of Nightwatchjs
- Open source3
- Testing2
- Automates browsers2
- Better cross browser (use selenium)1
- Cross-Browser Testing1
- Multiple Browser Support1
- Parallel Test Running1
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Cons of Jest
- Ambiguous configuration3
- Difficult3
- Documentation3
- Many bugs still not fixed months/years after reporting2
- Multiple error messages for same error2
- Difficult to run single test/describe/file2
- Ambiguous2
- Bugged2
- Slow1
- Reporter is too general1
- BeforeAll timing out makes all passing tests fail1
- Unstable1
- Bad docs1
- Still does't support .mjs files natively1
- Can't fail beforeAll to abort tests1
- Interaction with watch mode on terminal0
Cons of Nightwatchjs
- No automatic wait2
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What is Jest?
What is Nightwatchjs?
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