Software Testing Videos and Tutorials: Load Testing, Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Performance Testing, Agile Testing, DevOps
Unit Testing has moved from fringe to mainstream, which is great. Unfortunately, developers are creating mountains of unmaintainable tests as a side effect. Jay Fields has been fighting the maintenance battle pretty aggressively for years, and this talk captures what he believes is the most effective way to test.
PHP is not the best language to catch errors in code, like mistyped names of variables. This is what static code analysis tools (named linters or lints) can do: find bugs in code before it ever get executed. Linters don’t replace unit tests, but generally they are faster and cheaper to set up. I’ll talk about my XRef lint project (http://xref-lint.net/) as well as other helpful open source alternatives: phplint (http://www.icosaedro.it/phplint/), arcanist (http://phabricator.org/) and scrutinizer (https://scrutinizer-ci.com/).
Tests should save our money and time. How is it that they often become the stumbling block and slow down the work? They fail every time you try to do some refactoring and are difficult to maintain ultimately increasing the cost of software maintenance.
Skilled software testing has not fit well into the culture of Agile development. Agile was not created by testers, or with testers, or with deep testing in mind. As a result, people who study and practice the testing discipline have done so largely outside of Agile culture. To help fix this, the “Agile Testing Quadrants” should help you explain a better way for testing and development to coexist.
Agile development is a big thing nowadays. Almost every project wants to deliver value as quick as possible, but not all of them succeed because of the share amount of work most projects require. But what if you could actually deliver 2 times more value, but 3 times less features? Behat is an open source Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework for PHP inspired by the Ruby Cucumber BDD framework.
Selenium tests can quickly grow in size and could become difficult to maintain, unless adhered to DRY principles to the extreme. Geb is an open source browser automation solution that brings together the power of WebDriver, the elegance of jQuery content selection, the robustness of Page Object modelling and the expressiveness of the Groovy language.
So your team has made the transition to agile and your work is broken down into user stories. It makes perfect sense to break work down into smaller chunks, but now you’re running into problems with estimation and communication. Your team is delivering value but it’s been discovered that user stories are thrashing through the analysis, development and QA processes. What is going on here? Come a software development process with a deceiving name: Behavior Driven Development.
Copyright © 2009-2025 Software Testing Magazine by Martinig & Associates