ATTENTION: This session requires advance signup to attend. For Online Schedule: Please utilize the RSVP link below the description to reserve your seat. For SXSW GO App: Use the RSVP 'Find a Timeslot' link. You must have a SXSW Interactive, Gold, or Platinum badge to attend, and, you must have an activated SXsocial account (social.sxsw.com) to reserve a seat. If you have any issues with signing up, please email support@sxsw.com. VERY IMPORTANT: Because of the limited space, we recommend you arrive at least 15 minutes prior to the published start time of this session. If you have not checked in at the room you RSVPed for at least five minutes prior to the session start time, you may lose your seat to an attendee in the waiting list line.

Prerequisites:
To get the most out of this workshop attendees should have an intermediate to advanced understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as some familiarity with Chrome Developer Tools. It will also be helpful to be have experience installing and using Node.js and npm modules.

What to Bring:
Please bring a laptop with your favorite text editor and Node.js installed, as we will be doing live coding in this workshop.

So you've finally taken the advice of your peers and started writing unit tests for your JavaScript. Now what happens when you write great tests, but then realize the application's features still don't work right? Or you increase the code coverage, but still don't get the quality your users expect. How much time is spent by your QA team running the same regression tests over and over again? Does the idea of performing a manual smoke test before each code commit make you want to run for the hills? All of these issues can be addressed with a better JavaScript testing approach.

Unit and functional tests are very closely tied to agile and behavior driven development (BDD) and this workshop will walk you through how to integrate testing best practices for a more reliable development process. It will also cover the various technologies used today such as Jasmine, PhantomJS, Selenium, and Cucumber to name a few, and how to integrate these into modern JavaScript applications.

The workshop will begin with an introduction to testing and why it's so important in modern JavaScript development. We will then move into specific technologies used for testing as well as approaches for writing tests in popular JavaScript frameworks.

This workshop will include some hands on coding to introduce topics as well as demos and code samples that can be used in your own projects.

By the end of this four hour long workshop you'll have learned:
- What is testing and why is it so important for JavaScript
- How does testing fit into Agile and BDD workflows
- What are the most useful technologies for setting up and executing tests
- Some approaches for writing tests in popular JavaScript frameworks (i.e. Backbone, Angular, React, etc.)
- Hands on practice writing your own tests