Don’t use promises as conditionals

Don’t write conditionals like this:

if (returnsPromise()) {
    // stuff
}

Promises are always truthy, so this assertion will never fail. Usually, the intention was to match the result of the promise. If that’s the case, simply add an await.

if (await returnsPromise()) {
    // stuff
}

Examples

Webdriver pre-4.0

In the past, WebDriver had a promise manager that scheduled commands and made it easy to write tests that appeared synchronous despite the fact that each command was being sent asynchronously to the browser. This led to confusing behavior and sometimes code like this was written:

function isOk() {
    see('Loading');
    return find('Ok').isPresent();
}

function doStuff() {
    click('Start');
    if (isOk()) {
        // Do stuff when the page says 'ok'
    } else {
        // Do something else if that page isn't ok
    }
}

The return value of isOk() was a promise, but someone who took synchronicity for granted would think it’s a boolean. Here the if statement could never reach the else block.

Refactoring

Similar mistakes can be made if the helper function goes from synchronous to an async function without changing all of the callers to await it.