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

Extracting test helpers

The Git tag for this section is extracting-test-helpers.

It's time to dry up our code. We'll do this in two ways:

  • Replace our stub and spy with Jest's built-in spy functionality
  • Extract repeated test code into their own files that can be reused across test suites

Using Jest to spy and stub

So far in this chapter you've built a usable set of spy and stub functions. Jest has built-in functionality that does the same thing but works slightly differently.

Here's a rundown of Jest test double support and how it compares to what you've built. We'll convert our CustomerForm tests to use these new functions in just a moment:

  • To create a new spy, call jest.fn(). For example...