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Learn the process of writing feature level tests for a full stack web app, using Outside-in TDD.

TDD Feature-Level Tests


Now that we are in the green we should take a moment to consider refactoring our code.

Our code is pretty basic and succinct.  We won't refactor it but will take a moment to consider our current code implementation.

For more on the refactor phase, you can try the Codecademy <a href="https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-javascript-unit-testing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Learn JavaScript Unit Testing With Mocha</a> Course.

#### Feature Test II
Returning to our poetry app demo, we want to write a test to check if the application saves the title and text of a user’s poem when they press the submit button. 

The functionality we want to test is:
1. The user enters text into a text input element (the poem)
2. The user enters text into a second text input element (the title of the poem) 
3. The user presses a submit button

Adding the `describe` and `it` blocks for this second test would look like this: 

```js
  describe('demo poetry web app', () => { 
    it('saves the user poem and title', () => {

    });
  });


```
Next, we want to write the setup, exercise, and verification phases of our test.

In the setup phase for this test, we create variables to represent a user's input to the title and poem fields on the home page.
```js
     const title = 'Words Birth Worlds';
     const poem = 'Our words are marvelous weapons with which we could behead the sun';
```

The second  test  would now look like this: 

```js
  describe('demo poetry web app', () => { 
    it('saves the user poem and title', () => {
      const title = 'Words Birth Worlds';
      const poem = 'Our words are marvelous weapons with which we could behead the sun';
    });
  });


```


Feature Test II: Setup


Now that we have written our second test, it is time to write the minimal implementation code to move us forward in the TDD process. Running the test suite for our poetry web app at this point would give us this error message:

![An element could not be located on the page using the given search parameters](https://content.codecademy.com/courses/tdd-feature-test/stuck-in-the-red-1.png)

The error message describes the HTML issue that is preventing our test from continuing.

To address this error message, we would create an `<input>` with the ID, `title` in our **index.html** file. It would look like this:

```html
<label for="title">Title</label>
<input id="title">
```
Now when we run our test, we will get a step further and receive an error message that tells us the next line of HTML code we need to write:

![An element could not be located on the page using the given search parameters](https://content.codecademy.com/courses/tdd-feature-test/stuck-in-the-red-2.png)

This error message tells us we are missing a `<textarea>` element with the ID, `poem`. We can address this by adding the following to our **index.html**:

```html
<label for="poem">Your poem:</label>
<textarea id="poem"></textarea>
```
Running the test again would give us a similar error message concerning the input element with the `type` equal to `submit`. This is the submit button referenced in our test code, and we can address this error by adding the following code to our **index.html** file:

```html
<input type="submit">
```

The complete **index.html** file would now look like this:

```html
<section id="poems">
</section>

<label for="title">Title</label>
<input id="title">

<label for="poem">Your poem:</label>
<textarea id="poem"></textarea>

<input type="submit">
```

Running the test suite now would give us an error message like this:

![AssertionError: expected '' to include "Words Birth Worlds"](https://content.codecademy.com/courses/tdd-feature-test/stuck-in-the-red-3.png)

While this error message looks similar to the ones we have been seeing,  it is a different type of error message, and it signals the need for a shift in our TDD process. 

What's different here is that the failure comes from the *verification* phase instead of the *exercise* phase. While this isn't always the case, that means that we've changed the implementation code enough to get to the part of the test where we're specifying behavior, not just the existence of elements. 

The kind of test we need to write in response to this error will force us to drop levels in the TDD Testing Pyramid. 


Stuck In The Red

Feature tests exercise behavior by simulating a user navigating the application in a web browser.

Imagine we wanted to create a simple web-based poetry writing application.

The first feature test we want to write is to check our application's *empty state*.  The functionality we want to test is:
- When a `user visits the homepage`, the `poems section is empty`

We want to make sure that when there are no poems in the database, there are no poems rendered on the homepage. This is the application's *empty state*.

The testing suite for our poetry app would begin with nested describe blocks like this: 
```js
describe('Poetry web app', () => {
  describe('user visits root', () => {

  });
});
```

The term ‘root’, refers to our application’s entry point, which in this example is the home page that users will visit in their browser. 

Next, we add an `it` block to describe the behavior we want to test in our app:

```js
describe('Poetry web app', () => {
  describe('user visits root', () => {
    it('page starts blank', () => {

    });  
  });
});
```
When a user visits the root of our app, they should have a blank page on which to write their own poem.

#### The Plumbing
Next, we reach for our feature testing toolbelt. We start by using the global `browser` variable that is provided by WebdriverI/O. 

The `browser` variable is powerful because it gives us access to the browser that Phantom is running in the background. We can simulate a user interacting with our website by calling different methods on the global `browser` variable in our test suite. 

For example, we can use `browser.url()` to simulate a user visiting the home page of our application, which is the first behavior we want to test.

The `.url` method navigates to the URL that is passed to it as an argument.  The following line of code would navigate to the Codecademy website in the Phantom browser.

```js
browser.url('https://www.codecademy.com')
```

In the case of our poetry web app, we will pass in `'/'` as the argument, which will point the browser to the root file of our project, which in this case is our **index.html**. 

The code would look like this:

```js
describe('poetry web app', () => {
  describe('user visits root', () => {
    it('page starts blank', () => {
      browser.url('/');
    });  
  });
});
```


Feature Test I

Congratulations! You've built tests for a feature.

You will notice a couple changes to your files and the addition of a web browser. First, let's take a look at your **index.html** file. You will see we added some tags to the file and added an `<h1>` element with a title for our webpage. 

We also linked to a **style.css** file that will provide some basic styling to the code you have written, so that we can see what our messaging app might look like in a live browser! To view your app, run `npm start` in the terminal component and then refresh the browser on the right.  

Take a look at the **style.css** file in the editor. Feel free to add and change styles in the **style.css** file to customize your web application's UI. 

After making any changes to your **style.css** file, run `npm start`  in your terminal, and refresh your browser to see the changes.

In this lesson, we have been writing tests at the top level of the TDD Testing Pyramid, which concerns the part of the app that users interact with. To make our feature test pass and get back into the green we need to drop down to the server level &mdash; which concerns the part of the application that makes ‘POST’ requests to the server.

#### In this lesson you learned:
- When developing a new feature and practicing outside-in development, feature tests are where we’ll typically start. 
- Feature tests often incorporate every layer of the application and &mdash; using WebDriverI/O and Mocha &mdash; exercise features in the same way that a human user would. They’re a good tool for reproducing end-user behavior.
- WebDriverI/O is a Node package that interacts with a “headless” instance of PhantomJS.
- Feedback from feature tests is usually in terms of HTML (i.e. that text or button that you said would be on the page isn't on the page).
- Because feature tests typically hit every layer of a developer's stack, they are slower than tests at lower layers, and errors thrown in feature tests can be difficult to interpret and provide little guidance on what the developer can do to resolve them. 
- Their value, however, is in developer confidence that the software functions as expected.

Review

The next step for our poetry web app is to use our `browser` variable for the exercise phase of the test. 

First, we will set the URL of the browser to go to the root of our project using the `.url` method:
``` js
browser.url('/');
```

Next, we will use the `.setValue` method,  which sends a sequence of keystrokes to an element, based on a string argument.

We will use `.setValue()`  to mimic a user entering the title and poem into the corresponding HTML input elements at the root of our web app. 

The first argument passed to `.setValue()` is the CSS selector that references an HTML element, and the second argument is the value you want to assign that element.
```js
browser.setValue('input[id=title]', title);
browser.setValue('textarea[id=poem]', poem);
```

In the example above, a text input with the ID of `title` will be set to a value of `title`. Also, the textarea with ID `poem` will be set to the value `poem`.  The variables referenced here are the ones we created in the setup phase.

To complete the exercise phase of our test we would use the `.click` method to mimic a user clicking on a submit button. 

```js
 browser.click('input[type=submit]');
```

Our second test, with the setup and exercise phases, now looks like this:

```js
  describe('demo poetry web app', () => { 
    it('saves the user poem and title', () => {
      // Setup
      const title = 'Words Birth Worlds';
      const poem = 'Our words are marvelous weapons with which we could behead the sun';
     // Exercise
      browser.url('/');
      browser.setValue('input[id=title]', title);
      browser.setValue('textarea[id=poem]', poem);
      browser.click('input[type=submit]');
    });
  });
```


Feature Test II: Exercise

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:
 ```js
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:

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

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

```


Feature Test I: Assert

Now that we have written our first test with an assert statement, we will run the test and use the error message to drive the next step in our development process.

When executing a feature test that fails, errors will have messages that discuss the failure in terms of HTML (i.e. that text or button that you said would be on the page isn't on the page) or HTTP (i.e. the request that this page made resulted in a 404 HTTP status because the route you requested didn't exist).

Considering our poetry web app example, if we ran our test suite we would get an error message that included:

![Error: An element could not be located on the page using the given search parameters](https://content.codecademy.com/courses/tdd-feature-test/feature-test-I-passing-1.png)

The error message describes the issue in terms of HTML elements and tells us that the element we are expecting does not exist on our page. This is because we have not yet created the HTML in our **index.html** file.  

Using a strict TDD approach, we would write just enough HTML code to make our test pass. Let’s do that now.

```html
<section id="poems"></section>
```

When we run our tests we get a message confirming that it is passing.

![Passing: without existing poems, page starts blank](https://content.codecademy.com/courses/tdd-feature-test/feature-test-I-passing-2.png)

We have written our first feature test and moved from the red to the green using a TDD approach. 

We expected this test to pass because we haven’t created any poems as part of our test’s setup. Each test is discrete and isolated from the other parts of the project, so we know that the list of poems will be empty.


Feature Test I: Passing

Often the hardest part of creating a full-stack web application is knowing where to start. In this lesson, we will use an outside-in development process. With this approach, we start to build our new functionality at the feature level.

Starting at the feature level of the pyramid (going outside-in) means you begin by writing tests that inform implementation of the code that a user's browser renders. These tests involve the aspects of your project that users will see and interact with. 

In this lesson:
- You will learn a few tools for writing feature-level tests.
- You will go through a few rounds of the TDD cycle at the feature level to build an application that renders user input.
- You will end the lesson "in the red," with a failing feature-level test that you can only address by "dropping" to the server level.

If you want to continue the journey, you can pick up where you left off in the Codecademy course on testing the server.

Introduction

Now that we have programmed the behavior we want to test in the exercise phase, we will write the verification phase of our test. We will compare the actual results of exercising the code with the expected results.

In the case of our poetry app, we want to verify that once a user submits a poem, the section of the app's webpage that we have decided will display the poems includes that poem.

We have created that element already to make our first feature test pass. It is the following line of code in our **index.html** file:

```
<section id="poems">
</section>
```

To add an `assert` statement to evaluate the behavior of our feature, we will use the `browser` variable, and  `.getText()`  to return the text contents of the element, with the `id` `poem`.  

The Chai Assertion Library allows us to use the `.include` method to check if the string that is returned from `.getText()` includes the substrings of the title and poem that the user has submitted: 

```js
assert.include(browser.getText('#poems'), title);
assert.include(browser.getText('#poems'), poem);
```

In both `assert` statements the first argument we pass to `.include()` is the function we created above it. 

The `.include()` method works like this:

```js
assert.include(haystack, needle)
```

The full second test would now look like this:

```js
const {assert} = require('chai');

describe('User visits root', () => {

  describe('demo poetry web app', () => { 
    it('saves the user poem and title', () => {
      // Setup
      const title = 'Words Birth Worlds';
      const poem = 'Our words are marvelous weapons with which we could behead the sun;
     // Exercise
      browser.url('/');
      browser.setValue('input[id=title]', title);
      browser.setValue('textarea[id=poem]', poem);
      browser.click('input[type=submit]');
      // Verify
      assert.include(browser.getText('#poems'), title);
      assert.include(browser.getText('#poems'), poem);
    });
  });
});

```


Feature Test II: Verify

To write the most effective feature tests, we are going to employ a few additional tools. These tools are meant to support JavaScript testing. We will cover their uses in the scope of building a feature test that drives implementation. 


### Chai
Node.js has a default assertion library that provides enough functionality to write basic test code. The <a href="http://chaijs.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Chai testing library</a> extends the types of assertions we can make.

Chai is an assertion library for Node.js and browsers that can be paired with any JavaScript testing framework. 
 

### PhantomJS
<a href="http://phantomjs.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">PhantomJS</a> is a headless browser scriptable with a JavaScript API, which allows us to write tests that mimic user interaction and then evaluate the results. It does not require us to render the application in a browser. 

A browser runs "headless" when it doesn't render anything to the screen, but runs in the background. 

### WebdriverI/O
<a href="https://webdriver.io/docs/what-is-webdriverio" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">WebdriverIO</a> provides methods that allow us to programmatically interact with the user-facing elements of our app in the headless browser that PhantomJS runs. 

### Toolbelt High-Level Summary

Phantom allows us to run an instance of a headless browser so you can run tests that mimic user interaction with a web application. WebdriverIO provides the methods to interact with browser values programmatically.  We can make assertions against these tests using the Chai assertion library. 



