Jack Franklin

In this talk we'll dive into the approaches and strategies needed to create a great unit test environment for your JavaScript and React applications. We'll examine what makes the perfect test, what to avoid, and how to use more complex features like mocks and spies to enable you to write tests more easily. We'll also look at some of the common pitfalls and mistakes people make that can really begin to hurt you as your test suite grows.

2018

React Day Berlin

Tip Top Testing in JavaScript

I've just spent a year migrating an application to React and in this talk I'll share my experiences, good and bad, about how it's gone, both technically and non-technically, and cover all the potential pitfalls of a long running migration project.

The application I look after at work is a large ticketing platform that was written using Angular 1 and has not been maintained. With the new release of Angular 2, we made the decision to migrate off Angular and onto React. In this talk I’ll discuss why we did this (without criticising Angular, it has served us well) and how we’re migrating in small chunks. A big rewrite was off the cards; this application is business critical and as such we can’t afford to not be able to fix existing bugs or quickly add features because we’re rewriting. Instead we’ve split the work down into many small pieces that we can tackle one at a time. I’ll go through some code examples and talk not only about the benefits but the negatives too, because it’s not all been plain sailing. We’ll see how React’s approach and characteristics make it very adaptable and we’ll look at how we updated tests as we went to ensure our migrations maintained feature parity.

If you’ve got an existing application you’d like to migrate this talk should give you plenty of ideas about doing it in a non destructive way without rewriting and building from scratch.

2017

ReactiveConf

Lessons Learned Migrating Complex Software

We'll discuss the best tooling and approaches for building ReactJS applications in the NodeJS environment and in the browser using React TestUtils and other third party libraries that make it easy to test your components. We'll see how to build components in a way that makes them more maintainable, testable and easier to work with.

Slides are https://speakerdeck.com/reactamsterdam/jack-franklin-pusher-london-testing-react-applications