Free Development Tool: Automated JavaScript Framework Testing with BrowserSwarm

Related: “HTML5 and CSS3 Feature Detection with Modernizr”

Microsoft has launched a free development tool, BrowserSwarm, which helps developers automate how they test their JavaScript frameworks and libraries across different browsers. BrowserSwarm is an Internet Explorer (IE) partnership with Sauce Labs and the open source appendTo team. It’s powered through the cloud, so developers can save time and resources by setting up multiple browsers or device testing environments.

Like any development project, web developers must ensure that their projects perform well and reliably. Similarly, framework developers must test their frameworks so that the open source community has full confidence in adopting a framework for their own websites. Although major JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery or Modernizr have resources to perform regular testing, testing can prove to be a daunting and time-consuming task for those who are building a new framework. With this in mind, BrowserSwarm helps reduce the amount of time spent on testing frameworks so that developers can get back to innovating great frameworks on the web.

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BrowserSwarm works by connecting directly to your team’s code repository on GitHub. When you publish your latest project, BrowserSwarm automatically runs it against unit testing frameworks such as QUnit. You’ll get a report with a list of fixes that need to be addressed across different browsers, including modern and older versions of IE.

Be sure to read up on Microsoft’s announcement on the MSDN IE blog to learn more about BrowserSwarm. Will you be using this new development tool to test your JavaScript frameworks? Let us know by posting in the comments or send us a shoutout through our social networks!