I know things are rough for tech folks right now but wanted to put out there that I will be doing small remote #PHP#testing#online training sessions over Zoom. Small classes (3-4 folks and me) in the evening Eastern US time for maybe 90 minutes a session for 4-6 sessions. US$200. Need to firm up the materials but email me chartjes AT grumpy-learning.com. Might do a version for the same price that is just recordings.
@grmpyprogrammer I've been meaning to ask... do you have anything (sessions, courses, articles, books, etc) aimed at someone who normally doesn't write tests, looking to get the most bang for their test writing buck (ie most code coverage for number/type of tests) in order to start making the case to clients/employers for their value?
I need to start with something broader than unit tests so I can invest a little time upfront to start catching things & be like "see! these are great!"
@syntaxseed@grmpyprogrammer There’s integration testing that tests the functionality of your software as it interacts with other software (i.e., APIs, etc.), to ensure it works as expected. Then, there’s behavior or functional testing, which tests the functionality of the software to ensure it behaves as expected (this can use something like Selenium or BrowserStack or Cypress to basically “click around” the program and make sure it does the things you expect it to do).
@ramsey codeception is good, too, especially for apps that are (near) impossible to write unit tests for.
Clicking around is slow even when automated, but it does the job well when you need to refactor something to a more sane level, and you don't want to manually do everything all the time (especially when getting to a crucial point is cumbersome)
@ramsey@grmpyprogrammer aah yes we used to do something like this at my last job with a suite called SilkTest that would click around and check for elements in the dom. It was brutal... 😆
@syntaxseed@ramsey@grmpyprogrammer I was doing a similar thing at my previous employer. Essentially with some pear http client package via PHPUnit. Slightly mad maybe, but I remember it running fast and finding many issues 😊
Now we have some complicated frontend testing framework that runs slow and only one person in the team understands what's going on. Different issue though I guess :)
@syntaxseed@grmpyprogrammer I personally love Behat for Behavioural testing. The feature descriptions are written in Gherkin and are kind of human readable. And from those one creates reusable codesnippets that then test those described features.
It is - as always - a curve to start as one needs to create a bunch of code. But once you can reuse those snippets writing new feature descriptions becomes fast.
And the feature descriptions also describe your app which is often a plus 😁
@heiglandreas@syntaxseed@grmpyprogrammer The downside with Behat is that it's not very well documented and it doesn't do browser testing (Selenium is a terrible solution, IMO). Cypress does browser testing and can also use Gherkin. I typically use both. I mostly use Behat to test an API's contract, and Cypress to test the use cases in my application. This way there's no overlap and each test type serves a purpose.
@afilina@syntaxseed@grmpyprogrammer In my case I only need to test whether the login wotks. No Browser features necessary. But yes. in those cases other tools might be a better alternative.
For me in the end Gherkin was/is the killerfeature.
@syntaxseed I haven’t ever done anything specific like that — there are no types of tests that are “better” than others because they all have drawbacks. I’d be happy to chat with you over video about it as so much depends on the app itself
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