Effective Testing Strategies

Why a Robust Testing Strategy Matters

In today’s fast‑paced development cycles, testing isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. A solid testing strategy helps you catch regressions early, improve code quality, and deliver confidence to stakeholders.

1. Shift‑Left Testing

Start testing as early as possible in the development pipeline. By integrating unit tests into the CI process, you surface defects before they become costly to fix.

# .github/workflows/ci.yml
name: CI
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: '20'
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm test

2. Pyramid of Tests

Balance your test suite with a pyramid approach: many fast unit tests, fewer integration tests, and even fewer end‑to‑end tests.

• Unit Tests – Isolate a single function or component.
• Integration Tests – Verify interactions between modules.
• E2E Tests – Simulate real user flows.

3. Property‑Based Testing

Instead of hand‑crafting inputs, generate a wide range of data to validate invariants.

import { test } from 'fast-check';

test('array sort is idempotent', 
  fc.assert(
    fc.property(fc.array(fc.integer()), arr => {
      const sorted = arr.slice().sort((a,b)=>a-b);
      return JSON.stringify(sorted) === JSON.stringify(sorted.sort((a,b)=>a-b));
    })
  )
);