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

Adding Complex Form Interactions

It’s time to apply what you’ve learned to a more complicated HTML setup. In this chapter, we’ll test-drive a new component: AppointmentForm. It contains a select box, for selecting the service required, and a grid of radio buttons that form a calendar view for selecting the appointment time.

Combining both layout and form input, the code in this chapter shows how TDD gives you a structure for your work that makes even complicated scenarios straightforward: you will use your tests to grow the component into a component hierarchy, splitting out functionality from the main component as it begins to grow.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Choosing a value from a select box
  • Constructing a calendar view
  • Test-driving radio button groups
  • Reducing effort when constructing components

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have learned how to apply test-driven development to complex user...