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

Understanding TDD in the Wider Testing Landscape

At the beginning of this book, I spoke about dogma and how this book is a written form of my dogma. It details how I prefer to write applications and summarizes everything I've learnt about test-driven development up until this point in time.

There have been a number of recurring themes that many chapters have touched on across the book: the notion of 'strict' test-driven development, how and when to 'cheat', systematic refactoring, and so on.

Some dev teams like to adopt the mantra of move fast and break things. TDD is the opposite—we must go slow and think about things. To understand what this means in practice, we can compare TDD with various other popular testing techniques.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Test-driven development as a testing technique
  • Manual testing
  • Automated...