Getting Started with Testing

Test early, test often, test always. You’ve probably heard similar adages many times before, but you’re still not writing tests for your code. Why is that?

Most likely, the reason you’re not testing your code is one of three common scenarios:

1. You don’t know how to test.
2. You don’t realize how much faster you can operate thanks to tests.
3. You don’t believe scripted testing is actually valuable to you.

In this presentation, I would like to tackle all of those issues and get you up and running with – and excited about – testing today.

It has never been easier to build tests for your WordPress projects than it is right now. Tools like WP-CLI can generate your complete testing infrastructure with just a couple of commands. Testing frameworks like Codeception allow you to quickly test complex, browser-based features than ever before. Integration tools like Travis CI (and many, many others) afford you the ability to push new code into a project and trust it doesn’t break already-tested functionality. In this presentation we’ll see how to use all of these to our advantage to rapidly prepare our software for testing.

With the hard parts out of the way, and in record time, we can spend the balance of our time together on the why, what, and how of testing. In fact, I’ll give you the why for free right now: automated testing will save you dozens of hours and potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars on every single project – and make you a more effective developer in the process!

What You’ll Learn

• How to complete projects faster and with less effort
• To define your test once and confirm the desired behavior forever
• Why automated tests are better than manual test
• How to build automations for testing
• Tools for testing