You've been doing PHP development for a while but you find yourself constantly battling bugs, finding it hard to integrate bits of code together, and staying late to do deployments. You know there is a better way through test-driven development but you have no idea where to start.
You imagine yourself sitting down with an experienced developer -- just you and them, steadily working through problems and learning how to use test-driven development to design the API's and interfaces for your code while making sure nothing leaves development until you're 100% sure it's working.
In "Minimum Viable Tests" long-time PHP testing evangelist Chris Hartjes starts you off with the basics on the concepts surrounding test-driven development and shows you how a long-time grumpy programmer writes application with testing always in the front of his mind. Along the way you'll learn about:
- Chris' concept of "metatesting"
- The basics of what PHPUnit is and how it works
- The role of tests in the development process
- Effective use of test doubles
- Understanding how to mimic your application's environment via bootstrapping
- Writing wrappers around web API calls to make testing easier
- How fixtures and data providers help simplify your tests both today and tomorrow
- When you should use (and not abuse) monkey-patching tools
- The Arrange-Act-Assert test-writing strategy
- How to refactor existing tests
Chris has been watching and listening to people as they start their journey towards become test-driven developers. "Minimum Viable Tests" is designed to be your guide on the path to having well-tested, confidently-deployed PHP applications.
