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

Cucumber tests (and BDD tests in general) are similar to the unit tests we’ve been writing in the rest of the book. They are focused on specifying examples of behavior. They should make use of real data and numbers as means to test a general concept, like we’ve done in the two examples in this chapter.

BDD tests differ from unit tests in that they are system tests (having a much broader test surface area) and they are written in natural language.

Just as with unit tests, it’s important to find ways to simplify the code when writing BDD tests. The number one rule is to try to write generic Given, When, and Then phrases that can be reused across classes and extracted out of step definition files, either into the World class or some other module. We’ve seen an example of how to do that in this chapter.

In the next chapter, we’ll use a BDD test to drive the implementation of a new feature in Spec Logo.