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

Understanding TDD in the Wider Testing Landscape

Besides the mechanics of test-driven development, this book has touched on a few ideas about the mindset of the TDD practitioner: how and when to “cheat,” systematic refactoring, strict TDD, and so on.

Some dev teams like to adopt the mantra of move fast and break things. TDD is the opposite: 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 testing
  • Not testing at all

By the end of this chapter, you should have a good idea of why and how we practice TDD compared to other programming practices.