Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development

By : Daniel Irvine
Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development

By: Daniel Irvine

Overview of this book

Many programmers are aware of TDD but struggle to apply it beyond basic examples. This book teaches how to build complex, real-world applications using Test-Driven Development (TDD). It takes a first principles approach to the TDD process using plain Jest and includes test-driving the integration of libraries including React Router, Redux, and Relay (GraphQL). Readers will practice systematic refactoring while building out their own test framework, gaining a deep understanding of TDD tools and techniques. They will learn how to test-drive features such as client- and server-side form validation, data filtering and searching, navigation and user workflow, undo/redo, animation, LocalStorage access, WebSocket communication, and querying GraphQL endpoints. The book covers refactoring codebases to use the React Router and Redux libraries. via TDD. Redux is explored in depth, with reducers, middleware, sagas, and connected React components. The book also covers acceptance testing using Cucumber and Puppeteer. The book is fully up to date with React 16.9 and has in-depth coverage of hooks and the ‘act’ test helper.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: First Principles of TDD
6
Section 2: Building a Single-Page Application
12
Section 3: Interactivity
16
Section 4: Acceptance Testing with BDD

Adding better wait support

Many of our step definitions contain waits that pause our test script interaction with the browser while we wait for the animations to finish. Here's an example from our tests, which waits for a period of three seconds:

await this.getPage('user').waitFor(3000);

Unfortunately, this kind of wait is brittle as there are likely to be occasions when the timeout is slightly too short and the animation hasn't finished. In this case, the test will intermittently fail. Conversely, the wait period is actually quite long. As more tests are added, the timeouts add up and the test runs suddenly take forever to run.

What we can do instead is modify our production code to alert us when it is animating. We do this by adding an isAnimating class to the viewport div when an animation is running. We then use the Puppeteer waitForSelector function to...