front matter
Testing JavaScript Applications is the testing book I wish I had read six years ago. At that time, I was a quality assurance (QA) intern. It was my first experience in the software industry. Unfortunately, it didn’t require me to do what I liked the most: casting spells on a keyboard. Instead, I had to manually go through screens, click buttons, fill forms, and make sure that the software we built was working as it should.
“There must be a better way,” I thought. So I started crafting incantations of my own for machines to do the drudgery, liberating me to be the creative wizard I wanted to become.
After 18 months, I thought I had figured most of it out. By then, I had automated myself out of my QA role and become a software engineer.
Once I started writing applications, even more questions popped up in my mind. Having been into QA for a significant amount of time, I didn’t want to depend on others to build software that works. I also didn’t want to spend my precious spell-crafting time clicking buttons and filling forms, as I used to do.
Once again, I thought that “there must be a better way.” That’s when I started reading more about software testing. Now that I had access to the source code, I discovered that I could build software more confidently, in less time. Furthermore, I could liberate my QA friends to perform more creative and proactive work instead of just throwing software over the wall for them to test manually.