Drop the testing

[oliverjam]

As much as I love the Learn React Testing workshop I have to admit it hasn't been very effective.

Almost no projects have had tests in the last couple of cohorts, and FAC15 didn't even get close to finishing the workshop in the time we had. I think it's a bit much to jump them straight into learning totally different new concepts (integration testing the DOM, plus testing React) when they're still wrapping their brains around React itself.

I think it makes more sense to use that afternoon to reinforce React itself (and maybe that will give us enough time to cover hooks and classes 🙏)

Not requiring testing will dramatically simplify the project setup too, since Jest requires loads more config than Parcel at this point. We always end up with loads of confusing boilerplate for mocking non-JS imports and making sure Jest understands the Babel setup etc

[sofiapoh]

This is a great idea! Honestly didn't remember we taught testing since i've not done that workshop but I'm absolutely in favour of this (I also have mixed feelings about testing components in general). Let's take some time to come up with an alternative workshop!

[oliverjam]

I introduced it to fill the extra space when we went from 3 days to a full week after FAC12 so you would never have seen it

[astroash]

Testing may not appear in the react week projects, but from code reviewing the final week projects I have seen a number of groups implement testing in these. It seems that this workshop is sowing the seed for students to do things properly in the upcoming weeks 🌱

[oliverjam]

That sounds more promising. Maybe I just need to clean the workshop up a lot. I re-visited it today to give the latter half at Ticketmaster and it appears I wrote the whole thing in a frenzy of verbosity.

I'll see how I feel about it after some serious editing to make it more workshop and less manifesto

[astroash]

Btw, I just had another look at this workshop and saw that it tests individual components. When testing react SPAs I often only page components, and see how the page interacts as a whole.

Unsure whether this is best practice 🤷🏽‍♀️ (probs slightly lazy), but i wonder if this will be an easier way for students to think of tests and have less overhead.

[oliverjam]

Well those components are only rendered on the same page for convenience of the demo. I would say that's the level of complexity I would usually integration test in React—one big component that is conceptually a single thing, like a form.

But that's just my opinion/methodology—if testing the whole page-level component in one go doesn't require mocking too much stuff or writing a 900 line test then go for it.