PHP, Test Automation, and the Art of Architecture
Last night I spoke at the new Sheffield PHP meetup. Reunited after a four-year hiatus, the meetup took place at Couch in Sheffield, and was hosted by the Sheffield PHP agency Evoluted. They hired the venue outright, and provided a bar tab.
Behat and other behavioural testing tools take, as their input, a feature file with scenarios. These scenarios, in the Gherkin format, allow for a (non-technical) human-readable expression of the requirements of a feature. The way we write Behat scenarios has come a long way in the seven year history of the tool, so here is a brief look at how we used to write Gherkin scenarios, how they are written now, and what the advantages are of a more modern approach. Continue reading “Writing Good BDD Scenarios”
Behat is a behavioural testing suite for PHP. With its Cucumber-style scenarios and PHP step definitions, it is perfect for applying test automation to Behaviour Driven Development. But with changes in the past few years in the way it is typically used, it is becoming an important tool for software design, and driving the structure of the domain.
In the last month, I’ve done four PRs, fixing four broken builds in major PHP libraries. Here is what went wrong, how I fixed them, and what I learnt. Continue reading “Four Broken Builds”