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

Building an Application Component

The components you’ve built so far have been built in isolation: they don’t fit together, and there’s no workflow for the user to follow when they load the application. Up to this point, we’ve been manually testing our components by swapping them in and out of our index file, src/index.js.

In this chapter, we’ll tie all those components into a functioning system by creating a root application component, App, that displays each of these components in turn.

You have now seen almost all the TDD techniques you’ll need for test-driving React applications. This chapter covers one final technique: testing callback props.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Formulating a plan
  • Using state to control the active view
  • Test-driving callback props
  • Making use of callback values

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have learned how to use mocks to test the root component...