This morning I gave a presentation on acceptance testing, particularly in large WordPress projects. As I walked thru an 8-month project with tons of decisions made, I articulated the case for acceptance testing.
In short, my take is that when a customer makes a late-in-the-project change request, and you tweak your code, it's very hard to know how that change will impact all the rest of the code you've already written.
The fastest way to find newly created troubles is to use acceptance tests to circle back to all the main use cases of your software and test it from a customer experience and logic expectation perspective, not just from a developer (unit test) perspective.
My Acceptance Testing Presentation
What you might have noticed…
What you should notice from the slides is that I'm a big fan of codeception.
You might also wonder, why not just use Behat, since it can do behavior driven development (BDD) which is much of what I was talking about.
But codeception makes things much easier because of its use of PHP, because it means you don't need to become an expert with regular expressions. If you don't know what regular expressions are, count yourself lucky. If you know what they are, then you'll know why I'm saying codeception is way easier.
Getting Started with Codeception
In my presentation I listed several resources. But that's not clickable, so here you go:
- http://codeception.com/quickstart
- http://codeception.com/docs/01-Introduction
- http://codeception.com/docs/02-GettingStarted
- http://codeception.com/docs/04-AcceptanceTests
- http://dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story/
- https://vimeo.com/rzen/codeception