Introduction to Angular Testing — Here’s how to get started

Who else wants to learn how to properly test an Angular application — in half the time?

Photo by Razvan Chisu on Unsplash

Say!

Why does testing Angular applications have to be so complicated?

Where do you start when you have to write tests for your Angular application?

What are the first steps?

What should you test?

Not sure how to mock a dependency? Or if you should just inject it directly?

And what Angular testing tools should you use?

What’s Karma anyway?

And how do I use Jasmine?

Or is Mocha better?

Should you test everything? Are unit or integration tests better? What about smock or E2E tests?

Getting started with Angular testing can be overwhelming — it’s hard to know where to focus your limited time to get the best ROI.

And that, my friend, is why I’ve written this article. I’m going to help point you in the right direction and get you started with Angular testing.

This will be a quick but thorough introduction to the basic theory and principles you need to get started with Angular testing. And I’ll also answer some common questions that developers ask when they first start testing an Angular application.

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LET’S GO!

Testing lingo you need to know before we get started

Jasmine is a testing framework that is included in every Angular project created with the CLI, unless you specifically opt out.

It’s got all kinds of features like asynchronous testing, the ability to use ‘spies’ for implementing test doubles and more.

Assuming we have a simple helloWorld function we could test it with Jasmine like this.

describe('Hello world', function() {
  it('says hello', function() {
    expect(helloWorld()).toEqual('Hello world!');
  })…