Juntao Qiu - Test-Driven Development with React: Apply Test-Driven Development in Your Applications

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Sometimes, I find it hard to believe that its been more than two decades since Kent Beck published Extreme Programming Explained including Test-Driven Development as a core practice. In the years since then, the use of automated testing has become quite commonplace, something that almost all developers are familiar with however, the red-green-refactor cycle of TDD is often missing. The reality is that building software test first is not easy or trivial in real-world software development and requires deliberate practice and usually someone experienced to learn from.

At ThoughtWorks, my role is Head of Engineering responsible for the quality of the software that our teams produce for and with our clients. We set a high standard for the internal quality of the code we produce, wanting it to be maintainable and extensible so that it can quickly be changed with confidence. Test-Driven Development is a default practice in ThoughtWorks our experience shows that the practice leads to better software design and good confidence from a comprehensive automated test suite.

In my years at ThoughtWorks, Ive seen the phenomenal rise in the importance of JavaScript and browser applications. In 2010, we advised that the industry should treat JavaScript as a first-class language ( www.thoughtworks.com/radar/languages-and-frameworks/javascript-as-a-first-class-language ) on the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, applying all of the same engineering rigor as other platforms. As one of the authors of the Technology Radar, Ive seen and helped document the explosion of tooling and frameworks in JavaScript, many of which have been related to the area of test automation.

Test-Driven Development with React is a practical and hands-on guide to learn TDD with React, the most prevalent browser application framework in use today. It guides the reader through the fundamentals of TDD with React by implementing a series of requirements in a nontrivial example application. The book is fast-paced, so if youre unfamiliar with React and its friends, youll need to pause along the way and do some research as the example application grows in features and dependencies. Along the way, Juntao points out some smells or signs that the approach can be improved for example, cluttered code organization or hard-to-maintain test data.

Read this book if you would like to learn by example from someone who is an expert in using TDD to grow browser applications.

Evan Bottcher

March 2021

If youre a serious web application developer who wants to learn how to write high-quality code even under delivery pressure (with a tight deadline normally), its the book just for you.

I assume that you have the basic understanding of how the elementary things like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work in browsers. You dont have to be an expert, but you need to at least know how to write a basic HTML page from scratch with some css styles.

Also, you need to know basic concepts in JavaScript; some prior experience about any other programming language could help too.

Its a practical book that requires a lot of hands-on work. To make the most of it, I think just reading it through would not be enough; you need to follow the steps in different chapters and try to do it yourself.

For the sake of simplicity, in most cases, I just put the diff or necessary snippets to demonstrate different concepts. If you want the full codebase for any reason, you can download it from this repo: https://github.com/abruzzi/bookish-react-2nd .