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-driven development as a testing technique

TDD practitioners sometimes like to say that TDD is not about testing; rather, it’s about design, behavior, or specification, and the automated tests we have at the end are simply a bonus.

Yes, TDD is about design, but TDD is certainly about testing, too. TDD practitioners care that their software has a high level of quality, and this is the same thing that testers care about.

Sometimes, people question the naming of TDD because they feel that the notion of a “test” confuses the actual process. The reason for this is that developers misunderstand what it means to build a “test.” A typical unit testing tool offers you practically no guidance on how to write good tests. And it turns out that reframing tests as specifications and examples is a good way to introduce testing to developers.

All automated tests are hard to write. Sometimes, we forget to write important tests, or we build brittle tests...