Advanced PHP Programming

Chapter 6. Unit Testing

Testing and engineering are inextricably tied forever.

All code is tested at some point—perhaps during its implementation, during a dedicated testing phase, or when it goes live. Any developer who has launched broken code live knows that it is easier to test and debug code during development than after it goes into production.

Developers give many excuses for not testing code until it is too late. These are some of the popular ones:

• The project is too rushed.

• My code always works the first time.

• The code works on my machine.

Let’s explore these excuses. First, projects are rushed because productivity lags. Productivity is directly proportional to the amount of debugging required to make code stable and working. Unfortunately, ...