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

Summary

This chapter focused on improving our test suites. Readability is crucially important. Your tests act as specifications for your software. Each component test must clearly state what the expectation of the component is. And when a test fails, you want to be able to understand why it’s failed as quickly as possible.

You’ve seen that these priorities are often in tension with our usual idea of what good code is. For example, in our tests, we are willing to sacrifice performance if it makes the tests more readable.

If you’ve worked with React tests in the past, think about how long an average test was.In this chapter, you've seen a couple of mechanisms for keeping your test short: building domain-specific matchers and extracting little functions for querying the DOM.

You’ve also learned how to pull out React initialization code to avoid clutter in our test suites.

In the next chapter, we’ll move back to building new functionality...