Introduction to Automated Testing with SimpleTest

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Testing, and quality assurance, are an important part of maintaining high-quality software. Together they ensure that the code we write functions as it is intended to, and that changes made later on do not introduce any regressions into our application. Its tedious work and generally involves coming up with a list of tasks that prove a specific feature is working, and then repeating the list of tasks every time a change is made.

Automated testing is the process of writing code to reduce the number of things we need to do manually when testing our software. That list you created to ensure your software is working correctly is likely something that can be easily automated with a testing framework like SimpleTest. Doing so can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to perform QA, and improve the overall stability of our applications.

The SimpleTest testing framework was introduced into Drupal core early on in the Drupal 7 development cycle. Since then it has had a profound impact on the way our community develops Drupal. Core now contains a whole suite of tests that cover somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of the softwares functionality. Every time a new features is introduced, or a bug is fixed, this battery of tests confirms that the fix to the date formatting function didn't inadvertently break something else.

In this series we'll learn to write our own automated tests for Drupal 7 using SimpleTests. We'll walk through enabling SimpleTest, and running one or more test cases with both the SimpleTest UI, and with drush. Then we'll cover some of the related terminology like the difference between functional tests and unit tests. As well as discuss why testing is an important part of development and worth the investment.