Hi Brian,
I definitelly think you could do that. Just as you run "karma start", you
could also run "mocha". The problem karma is solving is not simply how to
run tests though. It's also how to setup the whole environment. Sure, you
can mock an HTML element, run a spy on that element. Then you might need to
mock an input field. Then video tag. Then placeholder text. Then
localStorage. Then more and more. Finally you end up with phantom.js - the
whole browser emulated in JavaScript. Then you say, "what the hell, if I
mock the whole thing, I might just use the whole thing directly". And you
run karma.
Small unit tests make sense. But plenty of tests you might write involve
"document.querySelector("button").click(); fixture.detectChanges()". So you
have to emulate at least 3 things there. So karma helps you not to.
If you have 1000+ unit tests, that's awesome! But if you have problems with
these, you might be better off thinking about your test setup instead of
runner. Perhaps you can only run a subset that's being worked on. There are
many scenarios and it depends on what you're doing and what problem you're
solving.
Zlatko
On Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 9:17:11 PM UTC+1, Brian wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Currently in the process of refactoring a good sized AngularJS+ES5 app,
> with 1000+ karma unit tests to typescript.
> Started to think about all the issues I had wiring karma tests in the
> past. Things like test suites breaking because I added a new module
> dependency, then the service I'm testing is not even using that new
> dependency...
>
> Then I begin to wonder, why even use Karma for unit testing beyond,
> perhaps, a thin layer of DI testing.
> In a unit test all dependencies should be mocked anyway, so why don't I
> save myself a lot of trouble, and just test directly the es6 exported
> classes using something like mocha+chai.
> Abstracting the underlying technology should even help keep things clean?
>
> If I have concerns about the DI side I could always add a thin layer to
> make sure the angular service is really giving me the instance/type I am
> expecting.
> Maybe I am too simple minded to see the issues with this... but before I
> go down this road of all but ditching karma completely though, I thought I
> might ping you experts to see what you thought.
>
> Appreciate any thoughts!
>
> /Brian
>
>
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