The last thing our test needs is an assert statement to verify that the behavior we expect is equal to the actual behavior of our code.

We want to make sure our app is in an empty state.

We can write a test for this behavior by deciding that poems will be listed in an HTML element with an id attribute set to poems. Then, write an assert statement to verify that the element with the ID poems is empty.

We can do this using the Chai assert.equal method, which evaluates if the two arguments are equal.

In the case of our poetry app, the assert statement would look like this:

assert.equal(browser.getText('#poems'), '')

Because we will render the poetry onto the page as text, we can evaluate the contents of the HTML element as a string.

The .getText method, from WebdriverI/O, gets the text content from the selected DOM element.

Here we are using browser.getText() to evaluate if the text in the element with the ID poems is equal to an empty string.

Our final code for this feature test would look like this:

describe('User visits root', () => {
  describe('without existing poems', () => {
    it('page starts blank', () => {
      browser.url('/');

      assert.equal(browser.getText('#poems'), '');
    });
  });
});