Unit testing

In my last post, we talked about PHPUnit's data providers, and how to leverage them to write more maintainable tests. Today, I want to talk about two more test-writing techniques that I've found to be very helpful.

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Most PHP developers are familiar with PHPUnit these days. It is the most widely used testing framework for PHP by a wide margin (although others do exist). One of its more under-utilized features, though is data providers.

Data providers are a PHPUnit feature (and many testing frameworks have an equivalent) that lets you run a single test method multiple times but with different data. Often it's presented as a way to save typing, but I find it is also a useful architectural tool, too. And there are ways to use them that are even nicer than what most people tend to do.

Continue reading this post on PeakD.

By now you may have heard the news from Paris that a unit testing framework has landed in Drupal core. A huge shout-out goes to everyone involved. I particularly want to note the work that's been put in by former GHOP students and members of the GHOP team. It's amazing to see how far some people have come in a short time, despite still having homework to do. :-)

The next step, of course, is to make Drupal itself fully-tested. That poses a number of challenges, particularly for unit tests. Because I'm sure others will be singing the (well-deserved) praises of the testing team, I want to take a moment to focus on that next step and one important approach: Testable APIs.