GraphQL offers clients a pretty incredible feature-set. The ease with which you can access and control included properties in the query is a breath of fresh air for front-end developers who’ve fought with complicated queries on more rigid interfaces like JSON API. GraphQL makes it so good, in fact, that it fools you into thinking it does things it doesn’t do. For instance, it produces the illusion that you can actually control the response shape from the client. Unfortunately, I’m here to burst your bubble… but don’t worry, there’s good news too.

Have you been using a tried-and-true testing framework for years and wondered whether it might ever be worth it to migrate over to one of the scrappy newcomers? Maybe you’ve wished someone would write up a practical comparison or put together a simple how-to-guide to ease the transition. This was exactly the situation in which we found ourselves on a team that had long used Nodeunit. We decided to take the jump and switched a newer project over to Jest. What follows is a practical guide born out of that experience.