What tools do you use to test your front-end portfolio and projects?

DevTools goes beyond basic functionality by offering new features like CSS Overview, which provides direct insights into the elements, fonts, and colors on a page in a visually appealing manner. Additionally, it offers testing capabilities where you can combine Performance with Lighthouse to identify rendering issues, pinpoint layout shifts, and identify elements that are causing slow rendering. Couple of years back you got to do Snippets and do some manual work. DevTools is one of the most direct and essential tools to work with – a must-use tool!

As a front-end developer, I always ensure the highest quality and optimal performance of my portfolio and projects. To achieve this, I utilize a range of tools for testing and debugging. One of my go-to tools is the browser developer tools, providing invaluable insights into the code structure and behavior. With the browser dev tools, I can inspect and modify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in real time, allowing me to identify and fix any issues. Additionally, I can simulate various devices and screen sizes to ensure a responsive design and test performance, and accessibility of my web pages. The browser dev tools are an essential part of my workflow, Delivering a seamless and user-friendly experience across different platforms and browsers.

I use the browser developer tools to inspect, debug and test web applications. Inspecting elements helps me in understanding the layout and structure of the code. The console is where I view and log messages, errors, and warnings from JavaScript code. It's an invaluable tool for debugging and understanding what's happening in the code. The debugger allows me to set breakpoints in my JavaScript code, inspect variables, step through the code execution, and watch for any unexpected behavior. This helps me identify and fix issues in my code logic. I also use it to simulate different mobile devices and screen resolutions to test how my website looks across various devices.

In my experience, defining a set of code rules is essential when working with skilled teams. In this scenario, they can rely on static analysis tools, like Linters. It is important to highlight that defining rules and using Linters it's a must-have in front-end projects, but we need to make sure to enforce these rules. To achieve that, I always recommend the usage of git hooks. These hooks will prevent unformatted code to become part of the project codebase. This kind of project setup is essential to improve code readability and maintainability in the long run.

When I was developing my front-end projects, I always made sure to use code validators as part of my testing. One time, I encountered a situation where my CSS was not rendering correctly on FireFox. Thanks to W3C CSS Validation, I was able to identify and fix the syntax errors in my code, ensuring that it complied with web standards and was compatible across different browsers. In my 9 years of experience as a front-end developer, I have found code validators to be invaluable tools for maintaining code quality and preventing potential issues. By using code validators, I can ensure that my front-end projects are well-structured, accessible, and compatible with a wide range of devices and browsers.

I totally agree and highly recommend that new frontend programmers use linters as a tool that can help identify potential errors in code. Several popular linters for front-end development, including ESLint, Stylelint, and Prettier, are tools that can improve code quality.

Even though Jest is an excellent tool, nowadays we have Vitest at our disposal, a similar library created by the Vue team but which can be used with any other frontend library or framework. As we are talking about frontend testing, we cannot forget the Testing Library, which facilitates component testing.

In my experience,?Automated testing tools can save me a lot of time and effort, and they can also help me ensure that my projects are thoroughly tested. Some popular automated testing tools include Selenium, Cypress, and Jest.

Writing unit tests is like organizing your thoughts before speaking. Besides aiding in the development process, it ensures that the code works as intended. Tools like Jest and Cypress assist in this process. Moreover, to achieve good test coverage, it's important to think about how to structure the code effectively. Practices such as dependency inversion and the use of design patterns end up being significant. When there is a well-structured and architected front-end, it becomes possible to inject test stubs and spies, thus facilitating the test coverage of the code.

Selenium is very good for frontend testing. Using selenium you can design your regression gui test and you can run them before any release

It is important to understand the impact of not building accessible digital products, because of this, apart from tools like Lighthouse, AXE and Wave, which are good to identify compliance issues like contrast ratios, heading order, missing alt text in images and others, I’d recommend using tools that show you, as a simulation, how it feels to use websites being color blind, dyslexic, and other issues. Funkify or Web Disability Simulator are great examples of this.

Some really good tools for frontend development are preprocessors, which can help write more efficient and maintainable code. Some of the popular preprocessors for front-end development include Sass, Less, and Stylus. Besides that, there are also other tools that will be very useful for frontend developers, namely the bundler, which can help minify and combine JavaScript and CSS code. This can help improve web page performance. Some of the popular bundlers for front-end development include Webpack, Parcel, and Rollup.