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 Animation

Animation lends itself to test-driven development just as much as any other feature. In this chapter, we’ll animate the Logo turtle movement as the user inputs commands.

There are two types of animation in Spec Logo:

  • First, when the turtle moves forward. For example, when the user enters forward 100 as an instruction, the turtle should move 100 units along, at a fixed speed. As it moves, it will draw a line behind it.
  • Second, when the turtle rotates. For example, if the user types rotate 90, then the turtle should rotate slowly until it has made a quarter turn.

Much of this chapter is about test-driving the window.requestAnimationFrame function. This is the browser API that allows us to animate visual elements on the screen, such as the position of the turtle or the length of a line. The mechanics of this function are explained in the third section of this chapter, Animating with requestAnimationFrame.

The importance of manual testing...