Testing PHP Applications using PHP

Testing PHP Applications

Audience:

• PHP developers who need to write tests for their applications
• QA engineers with a background of PHP who need to write automated tests for an application written in PHP

Objectives:

• Be able to write unit, integration and system tests in PHP.
• Use the testing frameworks of PHP.
• Be able to add tests to an existing application.
• Allow writing both black box and white box tests.

Course format

The regular length of the course is 16 academic hours including about 50% time for hands-on exercises. It is usually given in 2 days (9:00-17:00) but it can be spread to a longer period.

Prerequisites:

At least 6 month experience as a PHP programmer or taking an introductory PHP course prior to this class.

Content

• First we'll learn about the basic tools of testing and the test frameworks available in PHP (PHPUnit, SimpleTest).
• Then, we'll expand our set of tools in order to test in more interesting ways.
• The test will cover unit, integration, system and even acceptance testing with both white- and black-box testing in mind.
• Topics covered in the training include an introduction to the SimpleTest and PHPUnit testing frameworks, using mock objects, testing existing code, TDD - Test Driven development

Detailed Syllabus:

• Introduction to testing, why, when, who and how ?
• Understanding the basic tasks of the QA engineer
• Introduction to SimpleTest
• Introduction to PHPUnit
• Reporting framework
• Introduction to TAP - the Test Anything Protocol
• Extending the testing framework
• Setting up continuous integration (smoke testing)
• Testing web applications using the command line
• Testing already existing application
• Several ways to refactor code
• Web 2.0 application testing
• Selenium
• Testing the database
• Testing files
• Introduction to Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development
• Building random regression testing tool
• How PHP itself is tested