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Testing & Quality

Current state​

The project is at portfolio/MVP stage. The primary quality gates are:

PracticeStatus
Manual smoke testing (core flows)✅ Applied
ESLint (code style)✅ Configured
Prettier (formatting)✅ Configured
TypeScript strict mode✅ Enabled
Unit tests (business logic)🔄 Partial / planned
Integration tests (API endpoints)🔄 Planned
Frontend component tests🔄 Planned
End-to-end tests🔄 Planned

Manual smoke test checklist​

After each deployment, the following flows are verified manually:

  • Register a new account
  • Log in with existing credentials
  • Create a post
  • Reply to a post
  • Like and unlike a post
  • Follow and unfollow a user
  • View the following feed (confirm only followed users' posts appear)
  • Refresh token flow (wait for access token expiry or force-expire, confirm seamless retry)
  • Log out (confirm tokens are invalidated)

Code quality practices​

TypeScript​

The project uses TypeScript across both frontend and backend. Strict mode ("strict": true) is enabled to catch potential null/undefined bugs at compile time.

ESLint​

ESLint is configured with recommended rules for:

  • React (hooks rules, JSX best practices)
  • Node.js (no eval, no insecure patterns)
  • TypeScript-specific rules

Prettier​

Prettier enforces a consistent code style. Format-on-save is recommended in the developer setup.

Commit discipline​

  • Short, descriptive commit messages.
  • Feature branches merged via pull requests.
  • PR descriptions include a brief summary of the change and any manual test steps.

Unit tests — API layer​

Test individual service functions (e.g., createPost, generateFeed) in isolation with mocked database calls.

Recommended tool: Jest + ts-jest

// Example: test that createPost rejects empty content
it('should throw VALIDATION_ERROR for empty content', async () => {
  await expect(createPost({ content: '', authorId: 'u1' }))
    .rejects.toMatchObject({ code: 'VALIDATION_ERROR' });
});

Integration tests — REST endpoints​

Test full request/response cycles against an in-memory or test MongoDB instance.

Recommended tool: Supertest + Jest + MongoDB Memory Server

// Example: POST /posts returns 401 without token
it('POST /posts should return 401 when unauthenticated', async () => {
  const res = await request(app).post('/posts').send({ content: 'Hello' });
  expect(res.status).toBe(401);
});

Frontend component tests​

Test critical UI components in isolation (e.g., PostCard, FeedList, LoginForm).

Recommended tool: React Testing Library + Jest

End-to-end tests​

Test complete user journeys in a browser.

Recommended tool: Playwright or Cypress

CI pipeline (future)​

A minimal CI pipeline would run on every PR:

1. Install dependencies (npm ci)
2. Type-check (tsc --noEmit)
3. Lint (eslint .)
4. Unit + integration tests (jest)
5. Build (npm run build)

This ensures no broken types, lint violations, or failing tests reach the main branch.