stevegrunwell/intro-to-testing

Slides for "Testing Like You've Never Tested Before (Because You Haven't)"

Testing Like You've Never Tested Before (Because You Haven't)

Testing software in an automated fashion is one of the best ways to guarantee quality, reduce bugs, and prevent regressions in our code, and is a prerequisite to operating in a Continuous Integration environment. Unfortunately, the most difficult parts of testing come right at the beginning: scaffolding a test suite and writing our very first tests. For those who are new to automated testing, these hurdles can prove overwhelming.

This talk covers the fundamentals of testing, in a beginner-friendly way. We'll discuss how testing makes software better, the various levels of the Automation Pyramid, how to scaffold some basic unit and integration tests, and discuss the characteristics of great tests.

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Resources

• PHPUnit
• Mockery
• Testing with Guzzle
• The Five Types of Test Doubles & How to Create Them in PHPUnit by Jessica Mauerhan

Presentation History

• Longhorn PHP 2019 — May 4, 2019 (Joind.in)
• Ohio Laravel Meetup — April 3, 2019 (YouTube, PDF)
• Midwest PHP 2019 — March 9, 2019 (Joind.in, PDF)
• Nomad PHP — January 17, 2019 (Video, PDF)
• CodeMash 2019 — January 11, 2019 (PDF)
• WavePHP 2018 — September 21, 2018 (Joind.in, PDF)
• WordCamp Kent 2018 — June 9, 2018 (PDF)

intro-to-testing's Issues

Include --testdox example

The --testdox flag can make test results really readable, so it's worth adding a quick mention.

Accessibility of Red/Green/Refactor

While the term rolls off the tongue, it's important for the sake of accessibility to not rely only on colors. Some iconography would help make the slides more visible to the ~10% of the population with difficulties seeing red and/or green.

Props to @jmauerhan for catching this!

Test doubles with anonymous classes

After a good conversation with @Crell at Midwest PHP 2019, he raised some great points:

1. Mocking libraries aren't really as necessary as they once were, since PHP 7.0 gave us anonymous classes. Requiring a mocking library can in fact be a code smell: https://steemit.com/php/@crell/don-t-use-mocking-libraries
2. While there are different types of test doubles, the rules around them can be...well, squishy. Deeper acknowledgement that there's a lot of grey area would be helpful.

Reduce the amount of time spent on PHPUnit config

Another great bit of feedback from @jmauerhan, the PHPUnit configuration can be cut down significantly (like the whole second slide); unless there are practical examples to address, there isn't much need for the Bootstrap file slide.

Switch order on exception and output expectations

Feedback from @jmauerhan following CodeMash:

I would switch the assertions examples so you show the harder versions with try/catch, and ob buffer, then show the PHPUnit assertion that makes it easier.