Automated Testing and Drupal

Time slot: 
March 9th, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Room: 
Chicago 6 & 7
Track: 
Coder
Experience: 
Intermediate

If you've worked on a multi-developer project, you've probably seen it. Everyone works on their own copy of the repository, finishes a batch of changes, integrates changes to the repository...and at some point, someone discovers that there is a bug.

Perhaps they or someone else were coding against uncommitted changes on their own checkout, or two developers working on seemingly unrelated components accidentally introduced a conflict. Whatever the reason, such a bug may go undiscovered for some time, making it that much harder (and more expensive!) to track down and fix.

Automated testing, paired with the Agile practice of continuous integration, can help your team to avoid these problems. With frequent integrations into the main repository, there is less risk of accumulating conflicts and regular opportunities to check for them. Applying automated testing at each integration allows robust, consistent testing to be applied against the entire system, and new bugs or conflicts are found within minutes.

There are fewer bugs and conflicts, and those that occur are fixed in less time with less frustration.

In this session, I'll go over automated testing and continuous integration principles, best practices for applying these principles, and technologies that allow you to do so.

Video at archive.org.

Intended audience: 

Developers and QA staff who want to learn how to get code deployed more often and to start testing earlier.

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
How can SimpleTest be harnessed to do test-driven development in Drupal?
Question 2: 
How can a continuous integration system like Hudson be used to continually test and deploy code to different environments?
Question 3: 
How can external testing frameworks like Selenium be brought into Drupal?
Question 4: 
Other than running SimpleTest-based tests, what other automated tools can be brought to bear to improve the quality of your code?
Question 5: 
What other testing technologies should Drupal look to integrate in the future?
Automated Testing and Drupal has been selected and voting is closed.

Comments

Sounds interesting. Looking

Sounds interesting. Looking forward to hear new ideas. I have been involved with many drupal projects and we have able to do continuous integrations successfully with the help of bazaar and svn.

Slides??

Slides??

Blown away...

Steven, I was blown away by your presentation today. Can't wait to implement automated testing in our Drupal implementation. Take Care!

Presentation

Steven was probably one of the most prepared presenters at DrupalCon. I hope he see more to come from him. A+

Sorry I missed it. Are you

Sorry I missed it. Are you able to post your slides?

Thanks!

Enteprise

You can't be serious/enteprise without tests. So this is something very nececery, and is must !!!

My question is how did you make your first part of presentation. What app you have used ? ;)

Jenkins example code

In the demo of Jenkins you had 20-ish lines of code that called run-tests.sh and output the XML.

Is that example code available anywhere?

Thank you!

Thanks for all the comments.

The video and the presentation (which was authored with a tool called Prezi) are both up on our site at http://treehouseagency.com/blog/amy-cham/2011/04/06/drupalcon-chicago-20... .

I'll work on posting some sample code in the coming weeks.

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