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

Building a Logo Interpreter

Logo is a programming environment created in the 1960s. It was, for many decades, a popular way to teach children how to code—I have fond memories of writing Logo programs back in high school. At its core, it is a method for building graphics via imperative instructions.

In this part of the book, we’ll build an application called Spec Logo. The starting point is an already-functioning interpreter and a barebones UI. In the following chapters, we’ll bolt on additional features to this codebase.

This chapter provides a second opportunity to test-drive Redux. It covers the following topics:

  • Studying the Spec Logo user interface
  • Undoing and redoing user actions in Redux
  • Saving to local storage via Redux middleware
  • Changing keyboard focus

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have learned how to test-drive complex Redux reducers and middleware.