Wednesday, 9 May 2007

Overview of PHPUnit3

Evert has taken his foray into PHPunit3 while writing unit tests with the code. His main reason to pick this testing framework was that it is fully written in PHP 5 and can generate good reports.

He is of the opinion that PHPUnit3 is well documented. But he had some trouble getting it started. He had to sort it and figure out where to put the files, how big the scope of one unit test is and when to write a separate testing suite. For this, he took the help of Zend Framework, which resolved the issue.

He thinks PHPUnit3 is a little reversed when using the -> addTestSuite method in adding a unit test and a whole suit of tests.

Another thing that it lacks is an effort to add suits of tests. Every single suit needs to have a fairly complex class that needs to be repeated every time. Evert comments on writing this with a simple XML configuration file that includes unit tests, suits and can include other XML files.