Topic: phpPatterns

eXtreme programming, even by it’s name, is a controversial subject. Is it some kind of methodology for programming while sky diving?

Alot of what eXtreme programming advocates is “how to work” like coding in pairs. One aspect though which applies directly to code itself is unit testing.

In general the “testing lifecycle” of software is summarized as;

• unit testing: testing each “piece” of code
• system or integration testing: testing the code within the type of environment it will work in
• acceptance testing: testing the application from a user point of view

Now for your typical PHP project, testing is probably ad hoc, if at all, which is understandable with a language where you can build an “app” a user can begin working with in a matter of minutes.

But if the expiry date of the code we’re working on is longer than 24 hours, chances are we’ll end up writing something far bigger than we originally planned and start having to spend more and more time on debugging and testing code that wasn’t that well designed in the first place.

This is where unit testing can be a real help. The basic concept of unit testing is write more code which will test the main code we’ve written, by “throwing” sample data at it and examining what it gets back.

On reading “more code” you may be starting to lose interest but in general, writing test scripts is very little work and the good news is once they’re written, you can retest your code ad infinitum with nothing more than the click of a mouse. A change “here” may effect code we couldn’t have imagined - re-running a black box test tells us everything is still working properly.

There are two approaches to unit testing: black box testing (which is what we’ll be looking at here) and while box testing.

Black box testing takes the approach of working outside the code being tested (hence the code is a black box), passing data to it and examining what it gets back. This approach is particularily useful for classes where we’ve got a well designed API. It also means we don’t have to “mess” with the code we’re testing so generally less work.

White box testing takes the view that everything can ( and perhaps should ) be tested (no hiding behind APIs) and generally means adding the tests directly to the code being tested. In some cases it’s essential - a class method may return the correct value but some operation it performed “behind the scenes” has gone badly wrong. To some degree we’ve all used white box testing when using print statements inside a class to find out what’s going on.

In a perfect world, given infinite time and interest, we should probably use both to the fullest extent. Just using black box testing though is a good start and meets the practical constraint effecting most developers: lack of time.

One final piece of introduction: eXtreme programming suggests writing the tests before the code they’ll be testing.

From a developers perspectice, it takes some getting used to but, daring to intepret the intent of this practice, it’s meant to encourage developers to focus on designing a solid API. In general this has much in parallel with code that starts out as UML and isn’t such a far cry from what most developers probably do in their head anyway.

Enough theory. Now to make good the claim that unit testing (black box at least) is both easy and fast to implement.

There are quite a few PHP projects out there offering unit testing environments, which are all (hopefully) listed at the end of this article, all of which are projects approaching Java’s JUnit. PHP also has an assert() function which can be useful with procedural code but hamstrings itself by relying on a callback function to respond to exceptions.

In this article we’ll be using PHPUnit from Vincent Oostindië, author of the Eclipse Library (which is well worth checking out by the way). It’s provided with the code for this article.

This particular PHPUnit is a single script which is lightweight and extremely easy to use. Some would argue this is exactly what a unit testing tool should be like.

Now a while back we looked at the Strategy Pattern.

Using Vincent’s PHPUnit (which is well documented by the way - just point your browser at it and all will be revealed), the first thing is to create a sub directory “test” which will contain all the test scripts and PHPUnit itself (in the same code it’s renamed to index.php for convienience).

Taking one class in particular to illustrate how the test scripts are written, lets test the ValidateUser class (from the strategy pattern article).

The basic “rules” of Vincents test environment are;

<list> Create one test class per test script, the class name being the same as the file name. All methods within the test class beginning with the letters “test” will be executed by PHPUnit All test classes must extend a class Test The test scripts need to include the script they will be testing (obviously).</list>