The content in Joshua Eichorn post about certification and test automation has been on my mind with the development of WordPress and others. Padraic Brady has been discussing Unit Testing and test automation for a while now. With good reason, it should be part of every project.
I had to learn the hard way, but once you get into the swing of writing tests, it slowly starts to make sense. It makes a lot of sense. Something that bothered me about WordPress were regressions. WTF? Well, if there were unit tests and acceptance tests, the probability of that happening would decrease tremendously. Depending on the quality of the tests of course.
The good news is that WordPress is growing up also and has initial development of functional test automation. Shouldn’t every open source PHP project take the step forward in maturity and include the step of writing tests? Cheers for those projects that already have done this.
However, this isn’t the fault of the core developers of these projects. Writing tests may be boring and fun (I would be interested to find out why this is), but the core developers want to use their time to develop awesome and probably slightly broken features. If that is the case and users care, then I think it would be useful to write the tests instead of complaining. If not, then all is well, because users will eventually discover the bug after accessing the branches of code from a much higher level.
Cheers to any project that actually reads this post and follows through, if not already doing so. Although that outcome will most likely be coincidental, in any case. It is unlikely any project would change without user involvement.
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The PRADO project had unit tests but the core developers we’re having a hard time keeping on top of them. That asked for volunteers (or "Tof" just volunteered, I can’t quite remember now). A member of the community (Tof) stepped forward created a bunch of tests but what I’ve noticed and I think is even better is that he will create a unit test each time a bug is submitted. If you take a look at http://trac.pradosoft.com/prado/ticket/703 you’ll see he created the unit tests found that the bug was bogus and closed the ticket.
This did two things, he saved the core developers a bunch of time and created a unit test that can be used in the future to test that functionality for regression testing.