PHPT: Writing tests for PHP
- August 23, 2009
This year the PHP Community promoted the PHPTestFest in various places around the globe and it was a success. I participated in the event promoted by the PHPSP UG which ended up as the team with the most committed tests, after participating in the event I kept on going and have since obtained a SVN account and karma to be a official test commiter to PHP. So if you did not get the chance to learn how to write tests in your local TestFest I will now go over the steps taken so you can be ready for next year.
PHPT is a extremely simple test framework designed to test PHP. Its atomic nature and independent test execution make it perfect for the kind of tests needed, so tests can be really focused and test specific function and/or bugs.
What do I need to know?
The beauty about PHPT is that you need to know very little other than writing PHP code. A little knowledge into the inner workings of PHP will of course help you in finding areas of code that need testing, and how best to test them, but just knowing PHP is enough to start.
I have divided this post into 5 parts so we can get started:
- Preparing the Environment
- Choosing what to test
- Writing a test
- Executing a test
- Submitting a test to PHP
