On the Web Builder Zone (of DZone) Giorgio Sironi has posted an article looking at the Zend_Test component of the Zend Framework and how to use it for acceptance test-driven development.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development is an Agile technique that extends the test-first approach to the development of the front end of an application. The mechanics of Acceptance TDD are clear: first you write a test which defines the goal of your development, which is basically the feature you're adding to your application. As with all TDD variants, this test must fail.

With the help of the Zend_Test component, your tests can execute through the full MVC stact of your application (including views) to check to see if the resulting content matches certain criteria. He includes a few code examples showing content searching (contains), validating the query string and checking for a redirect.

From the Zend Developer Zone, there's a tutorial covering acceptance testing of web applications, specifically using PHPUnit and Selenium.

In this article I introduce the topic of Acceptance Testing (aka Functional Testing), something more PHP programmers should be starting to practice. I'm sure many of us are well aware of Unit Testing and even Integration Testing so where does this third wheel come into play for web applications given our growing obsession with Web 2.0 and AJAX and how does it differ from the former two practices? Below I'll explain this.

They start by asking "Why acceptance testing?" at all with an answer of "it's not about isolated testing, but testing as a whole". The rest of the article is broken up into several parts:

• Of User Stories and Acceptance Tests
• The Iteration Plan
• Preparing For Acceptance Testing (setting up PHPUnit and Selenium)
• Writing And Running The Acceptance Tests
• How to run the tests

In their example they show how to validate that a login on the site works as expected (including interacting with a form on the page).