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

Summary

Tests act like a safety harness in our learning; we can build little blocks of understanding, building on top of each other, up and up to ever-greater heights, without fear of falling.

In this chapter, you’ve learned a lot about the TDD experience.

To begin with, you set up a React project from scratch, pulling in only the dependencies you need to get things running. You’ve written two tests using Jest’s describe, it, and beforeEach functions. You discovered the act helper, which ensures all React rendering has been completed before your test expectations execute.

You’ve also seen plenty of testing ideas. Most importantly, you’ve practiced TDD’s red-green-refactor cycle. You’ve also used triangulation and you learned about the Arrange, Act, Assert pattern.

And we threw in a couple of design principles for good measure: DRY and YAGNI.

While this is a great start, the journey has only just begun. In the following chapter, we’ll test drive a more complex component.