Javascript has been enabling browsers for years. NodeJS brought it to the server side. TypeScript has wrapped familiar object-oriented, statically-typed syntax around it. Anywhere you look, you’ll find Javascript: on the client, server, mobile, and embedded systems.
These are three most common testing frameworks used in JavaScript based automation frameworks.
Jasmine , Mocha , Cucumber , Serenity/JS are very popular.
Common Ground: BDD Tests
– At their core, Mocha and Jasmine both offer Behavior-Driven Design (BDD) tests
– The describe function defines a test suite. The it function implements the BDD method of describing the behavior that a function should exhibit.
Below is the comparison in all these frameworks wrt to features
- Assertion library:
- Cucumber JS: Need to be integrated with Cucumber-assert
- Jasmine: Inbuilt
- Mocha: Need to be integrated with different assertion libraries : Chai, should.js, expect.js, better-assert
- Serenity: In-built (Screenplay Pattern)
- Gerkin language support:
- Cucumber JS: Inbuilt
- Jasmine: Need to be integrated with Karma or Cucumber
- Mocha: Need to be integrated with Mocha-Cakes or mocha-gherkin
- Serenity: In-built (Serenity BDD)
- Grouping/tagging of tests:
- Cucumber JS: Yes
- Jasmine: Yes
- Mocha: Yes
- Serenity: Yes
- Test runner:
- Cucumber JS: Command line
- Jasmine: Command line
- Mocha: Command line
- Serenity: In-built
- Reporting:
- Cucumber JS: Intuitive reports using cucumber-html-reporter and multiple-cucumber-html-reporter libraries
- Jasmine: Either cucumber reports can be generated or karma-jasmine-html-reporter or jasmine-pretty-html-reporter can be used, but these reports are less intuitive than Cucumber
- Mocha: Mocha-simple-html-reporter and mochawesome can be used for reporting. Mochawesome reports are intuitive, just like cucumber reports
- Serenity: In-Built
- Documentation/Forums support:
- Cucumber JS: Good
- Jasmine: Good
- Mocha: Good
- Serenity: Good
- Rerun of failed tests:
- Cucumber JS: No inbuilt support for JS version of Cucumber
- Jasmine: No inbuilt support
- Mocha: Inbuilt support available
- Serenity: In-Built
- Highlight slow tests:
- Cucumber JS: No support available
- Jasmine: Can be implemented using jasmine-slow-reporter
- Mocha: Inbuilt support available
- Serenity: No
- Asynchronous testing:
- Cucumber JS: Easy
- Jasmine: Difficult
- Mocha: Easy
- Serenity: Easy
- Parallel execution:
- Cucumber JS: Yes
- Jasmine: Yes
- Mocha: Yes
- Serenity : yes
- Plug-in support and extensibility:
- Cucumber JS: Limited
- Jasmine: Limited
- Mocha: Good
- Serenity: Good
Assertion:
– Jasmine has its own assertion library where as Mocha needs Chai library
Chai:
– It has the should style, the expect style, and the assert style
Sinon Fake Server:
– One feature that Sinon has that Jasmine does not is a fake server. This allows you to setup fake responses to AJAX requests made for certain URLs.
Running Tests:
– Mocha comes with a command line utility that you can use to run tests.
– Jasmine however does not have a command line utility to run tests. There are test runners out there for Jasmine, and a very popular one is Karma by the Angular team. Karma also allows support for Mocha if you’d like to run your Mocha tests that way.
- References:
- https://www.protractortest.org/#/frameworks
- https://webdriver.io/docs/frameworks.html
- https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-Jasmine-Mocha-and-Cucumber-testing-framework?share=1
- https://raygun.com/blog/mocha-vs-jasmine-chai-sinon-cucumber/
- https://www.codementor.io/@codementorteam/javascript-testing-framework-comparison-jasmine-vs-mocha-8s9k27za3
- https://serenity-js.org/handbook/index.html
TechieWolf 