Unit Testing and Travis

Tests are an important part of any software development process. We need to write test codes for any feature that we develop to check if that feature is working properly.
In this post, I am gonna talk about writing Unit tests and running those test codes.

If you are a developer, I assume you have heard about unit tests. Most of you probably even wrote one in your life. Unit testing is becoming more and more popular in software development. Let’s first talk about what Unit testing is:

What is unit testing?

Unit testing is the process through which units of source code are tested to verify if they work properly. Performing unit tests is a way to ensure that all functionalities of an application are working as they should. Unit tests inform the developer when a change in one unit interferes with the functionality of another. Modern unit testing frameworks are typically implemented using the same code used by the system under test. This enables a developer who is writing application code in a particular language to write their unit tests in that language as well.

What is a unit testing framework?

Unit testing frameworks are developed for the purpose of simplifying the process of unit-testing. Those frameworks enable the creation of Test Fixtures, which are classes that have specific attributes enabling them to be picked up by a Test Runner.

Although it is possible to perform unit tests without such a framework, the process can be difficult, complicated and very manual.

There are a lot of unit testing frameworks available. Each of the frameworks has its own merits and selecting one depends on what features are needed and the level of expertise of the development team. For my project, Engelsystem I choose PHPUnit as the testing framework.

PHPUnit

With PHPUnit, the most basic thing you’ll write is a test case. A test case is just a term for a class with several different tests all related to the same functionality. There are a few rules you’ll need to worry about when writing your cases so that they’ll work with PHPUnit:

  • The test class would extend the PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase class.
  • The test parameters will never receive any parameters.

Below is an example of a test code from my project, Engelsystem

<?php

class ShiftTypes_Model_test extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {

private $shift_id = null;

public function create_ShiftType(){
$this->shift_id = ShiftType_create('test', '1', 'test_description');
}

public function test_ShiftType_create() {
$count = count(ShiftTypes());
$this->assertNotFalse(create_ShiftType($shift_id));

// There should be one more ShiftTypes now
$this->assertEquals(count(ShiftTypes()), $count + 1);
}

public function test_ShiftType(){
$this->create_ShiftType();
$shift_type = ShiftType($this->shift_id);
$this->assertNotFalse($shift_type);
$this->assertTrue(count(ShiftTypes()) > 0);
$this->assertNotNull($shift_type);
$this->assertEquals($shift_type['name'], 'test');
$this->assertEquals(count(ShiftTypes()), 0);
$this->assertNull(ShiftTypes(-1));
}

public function teardown() {
if ($this->shift_id != null)
ShiftType_delete($this->shift_id);
}

}

?>

We can use different Assertions to test the functionality.

We are running these tests on Travis-CI

What is Travis-CI?

Travis CI is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted on GitHub.

Open source projects may be tested at no charge via travis-ci.org. Private projects may be tested at the same location on a fee basis. TravisPro provides custom deployments of a proprietary version on the customer’s own hardware.

Although the source is technically free software and available piecemeal on GitHub under permissive licenses, the company notes that it is unlikely that casual users could successfully integrate it on their own platforms.

To get started with Travis-CI, visit the following link, Getting started with Travis-CI.

We are developing new feature for Engelsystem.  Developers who are interested in contributing can work with us.

Development: https://github.com/fossasia/engelsystem             Issues/Bugs:https://github.com/fossasia/engelsystem/issues

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