Angular Jasmine tests fail with minified source

This is a known problem with angular, dependency injection and minification. Also, the problem resides precisely in the details of the code.

Case 1:

Without explicit injection, angular tries to infer the service from the service name when using declared functions as controllers.

angular.module('app').controller('MyController', MyController); function MyController(service1, service2, ...){ ... service1.doSomething ...} 

Case 2:

With explicit injection, angular uses the controller function parameters in the order in which they were injected.

angular.module('app').controller('MyController', MyController); MyController.$inject = ['service1', 'service2', ...] function MyController(a, b, ...){ ... a.doSomething ... } 

Case 1 will fail to work every time with minification because the name of the service will change and angular will not be able to infer the service that a, or b or c refer to by just looking at their names.

However, Case 2 will work every time because angular does not have to guess as it is being told by $inject that service1 is a and service 2 is b and so on.

If you are using a build utility like Gulp you can use ng-annotate which will automatically inject the dependencies for you in Case 1 and your code should still work.

In my own opinion and as a matter of style you should use case 2. I tend to follow something close to John Papa's Angular Style Guide