Congrats you’re in the red!

The red error messages describe the failures of our implementation code, so we can specifically address each issue that is preventing our test from passing.

Let’s look at the error message from our Phrase.initials() example in the last exercise:

The error tells us that Phrase is not defined. This is because we have not created an object named Phrase yet. Let’s do that now:

const Phrase = {}

When we run our test again the error would look like this:

We’re still in the red, but we have a new error. The error says that Phrase.initials is not a function. That’s because we haven’t added an .initials method to the Phrase object. Let’s do that now:

const Phrase = {
    initials() {
  }
}

Now when we run our test we get the following error:

This is the first error that is referencing the actual behavior of the .initials method.

The assert statement we wrote looked like this:

assert.strictEqual(Phrase.initials('Nelson Mandela'), 'NM');

We expected the result of passing Nelson Mandela to Phrase.initials() to be NM, but the actual result was undefined. This is because our method has not been programmed to return anything.

Following TDD, the next step would be writing the minimum possible implementation code to make our test pass. In this example, that would involve adding a line of implementation code so that .initials() returns our expected result, which is NM.

The minimum possible implementation code to make the test pass:

const Phrase = {
  initials(phr) {
    return 'NM';
  }
}

Now our test would pass and we would be in the green. But that doesn’t mean our method is working as intended. If we entered “Jody Williams” our method would return ‘NM’, not ‘JW’. We will address this issue when it is time, but following TDD, now that we have progressed from the red to the green, we will move into the refactor phase.