How to Build Runnable JavaScript Specifications

Programming is not only about giving the computer instructions about how to accomplish a task, it’s also about communicating ideas in a precise way with other people, or even to your future self. Such communication can have multiple goals, maybe to share information or just to allow easier modifications—it’s hard to change something if you don’t understand it or if you don’t remember what you did long time ago. Documentation is key, either as simple comments in your code or as whole documents describing the overall functionality of a program.

When we write software we also need to make sure that the code has the intended functionality. While there are formal methods to define semantics, the easiest and quickest (but less rigorous) way is to put that functionality into use and see if it produces the expected results.

Most developers are familiar with these practices: code documentation as comments to make explicit the goal of a block of code, and a series of tests to make sure functions give the desired output.

But usually the documentation and testing is done in different steps, and by unifying these practices, we can offer a better experience for anyone involved in the development of a project. This article explores as simple implementation of a program to run JavaScript specifications that work for both documentation and testing.

We are going to build a command-line interface that finds all the specification files in a directory, extracts all the assertions found inside each specification and evaluates their result, finally showing the results of which assertions failed and which ones passed.

The Specification Format

Each specification file will export a single string from a template literal. The first line can be taken as the title of the specification. The template literal will allow us to embed JS expressions between the string and each expression will represent an assertion. To identify each assertion we can start the line with a distinctive character, in this case, we can use the combination of the bar character (|) and a dash (-), which resembles a turnstile symbol that can sometimes be found as a symbolic representation for logical assertions.

The following is an example with some explanations of its use:

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