Testing and Tools in Angular 4

In this article, we’ll see what is testing & what are different types of Testing and Tools which are used in Angular 4 application other than manual testing & tools avail for it.

What is Testing?

An important phase in development which ensures your application is Bug-free and function as per expectation. That helps to create and deliver an efficient and reliable application.

What is Automated Testing?

Automated testing method for application testing makes use of special scripts and tools. Execute different test-cases, compares with a predicted or expected outcome. All this is done with help of scripts known as test scripts and tools which helps in executing it.

Key advantages:

  • Saves Costing & Time.
  • Accurate than Manual Testing.
  • Quick and fast means to catch bugs and errors.
  • Parallel testing of the modules at the same time.

Various Types of Testing

  1. Unit Testing: Focus on testing a small part of your application, cover one small unit and don’t care about how multiple units work together. Unit tests are fast, reliable and point in the exact direction of error & bug. In Angular 4 it tests a single component in isolation manner, that means without external resources likes database, API (Route, Service etc).
  2. Integration Testing: Covers multiple units focus on testing 2 or more small components of the application and ensure that they integrate and works as expected. Points out important bugs that would arise when multiple components execute simultaneously in the application. In the Angular4 testing a component with its all external resources like database, API(Route, Service etc).
  3. End to End Testing: While all the testing types mainly focus on code and their behavior. E2E(End to End Testing) test how your application would perform with the different-different environment, as other testing types would have no idea how the user would run the application. Tests the entire application as the whole i.e it’s different from other testing types.

Various Types of Tools:

In Angular 4, we have to write Test script with .spec.ts extension and to execute it we have tools like Karma, Jasmine & Protractor.

  • Jasmine: The Jasmine test framework provides everything needed to write basic tests. It ships with an HTML test runner that executes tests in the browser.
  • Karma: The karma test runner is ideal for writing and running unit tests while developing the application. It can be an integral part of the project’s development and continuous integration processes. This guide describes how to set up and run tests with karma.
  • Protractor: Use the protractor to write and run end-to-end (e2e) tests. End-to-end tests explore the application as users experience it. E2E testing, one process runs the real application and a second process runs protractor tests that simulate user behavior and assert that the application responds in the browser as expected.

In the next article, we’ll look into how to create a test script in our Angular4 application.