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.

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

It allows you to run all of the following: all core testcases at once, all core test groups, each core test case individually, all application-specific testcases at once, all application-specific test groups and each core test case individually. It also supports plugins, which means you can run plugin cases and groups.

He includes some samples of how it works - a few command line calls and what the output looks like.

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.

There are several different kinds of criteria to code coverage. The two most important ones are line coverage (or statement coverage as wikipedia puts it) and path coverage. [...] So how is it going to work? Pretty simple actually. Whenever you run a CakePHP test case Cake assembles information in the background about which lines of your subject-under-test are called.

He includes a few screenshots of the code coverage being run and the end result of the runner with the percent covered.

Check out the screenshots here and here.

PHPunit is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

His example builds the class off of a set of test for a "BowlingGame" that ends up with roll() and score() methods based off of the naming conventions used in the test:

Following the convention that the tests for a class BowlingGame (see below) are written in a class named BowlingGameTest (see above), the test case class' source is searched for variables that reference objects of the BowlingGame class and analyzing what methods are called on these objects.

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

In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).

He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.

So this evening I managed to get PHPT running my tests (they're just basic .phpt tests but run-tests is..well flakey is a nice description some days) for my winapi php extension wrapped inside a "generic test" for Visual Studio. [...] So what did all this accomplish? I now can run my phpt tests through visual studio and collect code coverage on what they’re testing. Like GCOV, only for windows.

She's also included a screenshot of what the interface and results of the testing look like in the latest Visual Studio tool.