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Testing

Software testing has been around for decades, and it has been proven to provide many crucial benefits, including:

  • Reduce the number of bugs and regressions
  • Increase project velocity (in the long run)
    • Improves accuracy of scheduling estimates
    • Saves time and money
  • Increase user trust and satisfaction

You should use automated testing. Do not fall prey to common rationalizations and excuses relating to insufficient time, money, or resources. Time spent developing tests is repaid ten fold.

Quality is the ally of schedule and cost, not their adversary. If we have to sacrifice quality to meet schedule, it’s because we are doing the job wrong from the very beginning.

-- James A. Ward

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.

-- Karl Wiegers

That being said, two important pitfalls should be acknowledged:

  1. It is possible to do automated testing incorrectly such that it is too expensive. See Why Test Automation Costs Too Much.
  2. It is possible to write automated tests that have little value.

To avoid these pitfalls, follow the best practices outlined in sections below.

Resources

Test directory structure

This directory contains all projects tests, grouped by testing technology. For all configuration related to builds that actually run these tests, please see the build directory.

tests
├── behat - contains all Behat tests
│    ├── features
│    │   ├── bootstrap
│    │   └── Example.feature
│    ├── behat.yml - contains behat configuration common to all behat profiles.
│    └── integration.yml - contains behat configuration for the integration profile, which is used to run tests on the integration environment.
├── jmeter  - contains all jMeter tests
└── phpunit - contains all PHP Unit tests

Executing tests

Before attempting to execute any tests, verify that composer dependencies are built by running composer install in the project root.

The following testing commands are available:

  • blt tests:all
  • blt tests:behat
  • blt tests:phpunit
  • blt tests:security-updates

Modifying test targets

See Extending BLT for more information on overriding default configuration values.

For more information on the commands, run:

  • ./vendor/bin/phpunit --help
  • ./vendor/bin/behat --help

Behat

The high-level purpose BDD is to create a strong connection between business requirements and the actual tests. Behat tests should mirror ticket acceptance criteria as closely as possible.

Consequently, proper Behat tests should be written using business domain language. The test should be comprehensible by the stakeholder and represent a clear business value. It should represent a typical user behavior and need not be an exhaustive representation of all possible scenarios.

See referenced materials for more information on BDD best practices.

Testing individual features or scenarios

To execute a single feature:

blt tests:behat -D behat.paths=${PWD}/tests/behat/features/Examples.feature
# Relative paths are assumed to be relative to tests/behat/features.
blt tests:behat -D behat.paths=Examples.feature

To execute a single scenario:

blt tests:behat -D behat.paths=${PWD}/tests/behat/features/Examples.feature:4
# Relative paths are assumed to be relative to tests/behat/features.
blt tests:behat -D behat.paths=Examples.feature:4

Where "4" is the line number of the scenario in the feature file.

To execute the tests directly (without BLT) see the following examples:

  • ./vendor/bin/behat -c tests/behat/local.yml tests/behat/features/Examples.feature -p local

Configuration

Configuration for the BLT Behat commands is stored in the behat configuration variable. You can modify the behavior of the BLT tests:behat target by customizing this configuration. See Extending BLT for more information on overriding configuration variables.

Behat's own configuration is defined in the following files:

  • tests/behat/behat.yml
  • tests/behat/example.local.yml
  • tests/behat/local.yml

Screenshots for failed steps

BLT includes the Behat ScreenshotExtension, configured by default to store a screenshot of any failed step locally. You can configure the extension globally under the Bex\Behat\ScreenshotExtension key in tests/behat/behat.yml, or override locally inside tests/behat.local.yml.

Read through the ScreenshotExtension documentation to discover how to change where images are saved, disable the extension, or change the screenshot taking mode.

Best practices

  • Behat tests must be used behaviorally. I.E., they must use business domain language.
  • Each test should be isolated. E.g., it should not depend on conditions created by another test. In pratice, this means:
    • Resetting testing environment via CI after test suite runs
    • Defining explicit cleanup tasks in features
  • @todo add examples of good and bad features

Common mistakes

  • Writing Behat tests that do not use business domain language.
  • Tests are not sufficiently isolated. Making tests interdependent diminishes their value!
  • Writing tests that are exhaustive of all scenarios rather than representative of a typical scenario.
  • Writing Behat tests when a unit test should be employed.

Resources

PHPUnit

Project level, functional PHPUnit tests are included in tests/phpunit. Any PHPUnit tests that affect specific modules or application level features should be placed in the same directory as that module, not in this directory.

Best practices

  • Tests should not contain any control statements
  • Be careful to make both positive and negative assertions of expectations
  • @todo add examples of good and bad tests

Common mistakes

  • Writing unit tests that are not independent
  • Making unit tests too large. Tests should be small and granular.
  • Asserting only positive conditions. Negative assertions should also be made.

Resources

Configuration

You can customize the tests:phpunit command by customize the configuration values for the phpunit key.

Each row under the phpunit key should contain a combination of the following properties:

  • config: path to either the Core phpunit configuration file (docroot/core/phpunit.xml.dist) or a custom one. If left blank, no configuration will be loaded with the unit test.
  • path: the path to the custom phpunit test
  • group: run tests only tagged with a specific @group
  • exclude: run tests excluding any tagged with this @group
  • filter: allows text filter for tests see documentation for more
phpunit:
  -
    config: ${docroot}/core/phpunit.xml.dist
    group: 'example'
  -
    config: ${docroot}/core/phpunit.xml.dist
    exclude: 'mylongtest'
    group: 'example'
  -
    config: ${docroot}/core/phpunit.xml.dist
    path: ${docroot}/modules/custom/example

Frontend Testing

BLT supports a frontend-test target that can be used to execute a variety of testing frameworks. Examples may include Jest, Jasmine, Mocha, Chai, etc.

Configuration

You can customize the configuration values for the frontend-test key to enable this capability of BLT.