Testing is important. Thats a given. You know that. I know that. Measure twice, cut once. I’m used to browser testing my work to ensure it looks right wherever it may be viewed. As a plugin developer however, I still have some learning to do.
Having released one plugin out into the wild I did so when I felt pretty confident that it worked and was ready for use. Use in this case referring to the way in which I had planned on using the plugin for the website it was initially created for. Of course that doesn’t account for any of the other ways the plugin can be used, all of which I created myself.
It didn’t take very long to find the first bug, however accidental. I was looking to fix something else and noticed that I had left some stray code in some javascript. Everything worked fine for what I was doing, but thats because I was testing in Firefox with Firebug so console.log was running fine. First bug, first bug fix release.
Then came the next bug and another update. Then a feature release update. And another error that I found looking over the code. New release, same story. Now a few versions in I feel pretty confident that things are working as they should, for any use of the plugin. Of course now that I’ve said that the next time I go in there I will probably find or introduce something else.
Its a good lesson to be learned, test, test and when you think everything is working, test it again. One of these days I may even look up something to help me test better. Which would probably help seeing as how the two plugins I am currently working on are more complicated than what I have worked on to date. Until then, back to testing.