You shall test

23 Apr 2014

But it's a pain. I don't like testing.

Booooooo !

I hear you, agile craftsmen. But since I never make bugs...

Booooooo ! Booooooo !

Got it. Still, I'm not a big fan of tests, I feel like I'm wasting my time. Except for very specific / complex / sensitive parts of the code, I hardly test my code. The fact that my work is usually very UI-centric does not help either. Toggle a button, rotate the camera using the mouse and check that the wireframe is correctly displayed. Good luck.

More testing is definitively something I want to try in this post series. Maybe I wouldn't have tried if it wasn't for this blog actually.

And sometimes, your system explodes, as is the case now with my angularJS side project. Each defect leads to a new one. My architecture is probably really bad, since this is my first project using this technological stack. The first isolated part I'll try to test is the REST API.

Testing a REST API

It's a single PHP page, using the Slim framework and accessing a mySql database. Around 10 different actions, with various error return codes.

phpUnit, DbUnit, sure, but PHP should stay an implementation detail.

Frustrated after these long minutes looking for tools, I decided to do it by hand: Create a test grunt configuration, binding to a test database, maybe using SqlLite, and then I'll do simple curl requests and check the results. And yes, some requests will have side effects and their order will matter.

Booooooo !

That's exactly the kind of mistakes 'bad' programers do, for lack of knowledge of the appropriate tooling. They end up re-inventing the wheel and wasting even more time. So let's sleep over it.