I love unit testing, and the confident feeling I get from my code being “all green”. But sometimes there are tests that need to be skipped for a bit, perhaps due to a failing backend service or an in-progress refactoring. The easiest solution is to comment them out, but then it’s easy to forget they are being skipped. Instead, I simply added a new test type – testSkip – to QUnit using the following code. Now when the test is skipped we see it marked as SKIPPED in the QUnit results.

QUnit.testSkip = function() {
   q.test(arguments[0] + " (SKIPPED)", function() {});
};

I use a similar approach for QUnit tests that involve user interaction. I run lots of tests when coding, but the interactive ones get in the way of my flow. So I have added the test type testManual which allows me to run them explicitly by simply adding testmanual to the URL parameters. A similar approach can be used for other test categories or to target tests to a particular browser.

QUnit.testManual = function() {
   if(/(\?|&)testmanual($|&|=)/.test(window.location.href)) {
      q.test.apply(q, arguments);
   } else {
      q.testSkip.apply(q, arguments);
   }
};

Related articles

• Introduction To JavaScript Unit Testing (coding.smashingmagazine.com)