For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I'd like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests.

He talks about their choice of SimpleTest, their test monitoring, CruiseControl and their "if it doesn't pass, you can't release it" mentality to keep their site as bug free as possible.

So you want to read up on Unit Testing in CakePHP? That is great, testing can be such a help in finding bugs. [...] Surprisingly, many people do not know yet what unit testing is. In this first part of a whole series you can get a good grasp of what it is and is not.

He goes over the basic concepts behind the testing - setting up test cases, comparing results, automating them and how they related to code coverage. He gets into more detail with a list of the assert functions (like assertNotEqual or assertClone) and some examples using the simpletest unit testing software. He wraps it up by listing some of the benefits of unit testing, the limitations of it, TDD and what Mock objects are.

I just started listing the techniques I've learned when writing tests to exercise the web interface of a PHP application. This is from my experience and my personal preferences; it's not the final word or necessarily right for everyone.

He suggests:

• Use SimpleTest's Web tester if you can
• Test the web output using regular expressions
• Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields
• Log HTTP requests in the application

A last day of a month - time to release a new Stubbles version. The release does not feature that much new features, we focused mainly on infrastructure and code quality improvements. The most important change of course is the change of the package separator.

Instead of the dots they've gone with the more standard double-colon that PHP already uses. There were also code quality improvements and a move away from SimpleTest out to the popular PHPUnit unit testing package.

You can download this new package from the Stubbles project site.

As I mentioned in my blog post on Paparrazzi testing, Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) has discussed how to test web templates or server pages. Since I'm currently working with Smarty templates, I wanted a simple way to run tests on them without needing to deal with a web server and the page navigation in a full web application.

Thankfully, he's found a nice, simple method for running tests against the Smarty engine (and includes that in the post - an interface to Smarty and the example test case to run against it).

I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn't have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. [...] I didn't need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick.

He includes the code (of course) and an example of it in action, three tests with their assertions. It's a simple little tool made of a simple purpose, a starting place for developers just learning unit testing to learn from.