Talking Drupal #446 - Test Driven Development

Today we are talking about Test Driven Development, Why it’s
important, and How it improves development with guest Alexey
Korepov. We’ll also cover Test Helpers as our module of the
week.


For show notes visit:
www.talkingDrupal.com/446
Topics

What does the term Test Driven Development (TDD) mean

Does Drupal make use of TDD

What makes TDD different from other methods of Development

Do you have to change your way of thinking

What are some good resources to learn TDD

Do you have any pointers for teams looking to get started

Are certain kinds of projects better suited to TDD

How have dev teams adapted to TDD

Any advice on environment setup

Any special tools

Resources

Open telemetry

QA Engineer

Kent Beck Test Driven Development: By Example

Needs tests tag

Local unit tests

PHPUnit

Guests

Alexey Korepov - korepov.pro Murz
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu
Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted an API that could dramatically
simplify the process of writing Drupal unit tests? There’s
a module for that.



Module name/project name:

Test Helpers



Brief history

How old: created in Sep 2022 by today’s guest, Alexey
Korepov

Versions available: 1.3.0 compatible with versions of
Drupal 9.4 or newer, right up to Drupal 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release less than 3 months
ago

Security coverage

Test coverage, would be ironic if it didn’t

API Documentation is available, linked from the project
page

Number of open issues: 2 open issues, which are
actually feature requests



Usage stats:

5 sites officially, but modules or sites can leverage
Test Helpers without enabling it, and this usage is
recommended, so the number is actually higher



Module features and usage

Provides a new container that automated tests can
leverage to perform common tasks with much less code.

For example, you can create a user or a node with a
single line of code

You can also mock more complex operations like an
entityQuery or loadMultiple call, again with a single line
of code

Traditionally, writing unit tests is more complicated
because by design they run without fully bootstrapping
Drupal

That means that your test needs to mock functions or
services in the code you’re testing which can result in
units tests being much longer than the code they’re testing

Test Helpers also allows your tests to leverage
existing mocks and stubs for popular services

The project page also links to the recording and slides
for a talk Alexey gave about Test Helpers at DrupalCon
Pittsburgh last year, if you want to do a deeper dive