trial and stderr

In a library I maintain, I wrote all the tests using names from the foo-bar-baz family in fixtures.

I realized that having 50 tests where all the test data is foo-bar-baz makes it harder to debug. Adding a console.log to a line that gets hit 50 times might yield variations on { foo: "bar" } for all 50 tests, but only one corresponds to the error I'm interested.

That's why I've switched to pulling random names from a less limited domain. For this library, I'm using Japanese food names. It doesn't matter what they are or what they mean. What matters is that I can search my test logs for tamago and, if I've only used tamago in one test, immediately find the data corresonding to the test I'm interested in, { tamago: { kake: "gohan" } }. Delicious.

There's a bunch of guides telling you how to do this painful-looking JSDOM setup stuff. You probably don't need it. Use Enzyme's shallow rendering, which doesn't require a DOM to mount on. As this smart guy suggests, you can call lifecycle methods yourself to emulate mounting.

This is the best practices guide you're looking for.

Check out this mess of test boilerplate. This looks awful. Don't do it. You don't need it.