This post originally appeared on my Patreon.
After what seemed like an eternity, I've converted the Twine 2 test suite to a pure JS-driven one... and more interestingly, the refactor into Browserify modules passes those tests. That gives me confidence that we can merge this branch into the main development branch, or trunk. We've made significant progress toward 2.0.9.
(My girlfriend asked: "Does this mean Twine is better now?" My war-weary reply: "It means it hasn't gotten any worse.")
Some quick lessons I've learned along the way:
- Testing is still crucial.
- Tests are still painstaking to write.
- Moving from Selenium IDE-based tests to pure JS did not speed up the tests, but that's mainly because each test now sets up an entirely new browser session.
- You want your tests to run in separate browser sessions, because otherwise they can trample all over each other.
- There's a Selenium adaptor for PhantomJS, a platform specifically designed for automation, that should speed up the tests. But if I try it right now, some tests fail, probably because I'm not inserting enough "wait until this element exists" checks -- it's going too fast.
- You can learn something by reading API documentation alone, but you're not going to enjoy it.