Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Irvine
Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Irvine

Overview of this book

Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming workflow that helps you build your apps by specifying behavior as automated tests. The TDD workflow future-proofs apps so that they can be modified without fear of breaking existing functionality. Another benefit of TDD is that it helps software development teams communicate their intentions more clearly, by way of test specifications. This book teaches you how to apply TDD when building React apps. You’ll create a sample app using the same React libraries and tools that professional React developers use, such as Jest, React Router, Redux, Relay (GraphQL), Cucumber, and Puppeteer. The TDD workflow is supported by various testing techniques and patterns, which are useful even if you’re not following the TDD process. This book covers these techniques by walking you through the creation of a component test framework. You’ll learn automated testing theory which will help you work with any of the test libraries that are in standard usage today, such as React Testing Library. This second edition has been revised with a stronger focus on concise code examples and has been fully updated for React 18. By the end of this TDD book, you’ll be able to use React, Redux, and GraphQL to develop robust web apps.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Exploring the TDD Workflow
10
Part 2 – Building Application Features
16
Part 3 – Interactivity
20
Part 4 – Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber

Test-Driving Redux

Redux is a predictable state container. To the uninitiated, these words mean very little. Thankfully, TDD can help us understand how to think about and implement our Redux application architecture. The tests in the chapter will help you see how Redux can be integrated into any application.

The headline benefit of Redux is the ability to share state between components in a way that provides data consistency when operating in an asynchronous browser environment. The big drawback is that you must introduce a whole bunch of plumbing and complexity into your application.

Here be dragons

For many applications, the complexity of Redux outweighs the benefits. Just because this chapter exists in this book does not mean you should be rushing out to use Redux. In fact, I hope that the code samples contained herein serve as warning enough for the complexity you will be introducing.

In this chapter, we’ll build a reducer and a saga to manage the submission...