NYCPHP Meetup

[David Mintz]

I get the impression that most developers report that they do automated
testing or they are trying to learn. Only a minority seem to be answering
flat-out no.

imho one of the major differences between a polished professional and a
hobbyist is responsible testing. That's why I still kick myself, as sort of
an eternal wannabe whose day-job description has zero to do with IT, but who
aspires nevertheless to write code that can be judged competent by any
standard:  I still haven't gotten the hang of unit testing, though I have
made some attempts to get religion and vow to keep trying.

It seems that I am not alone. So the question is, why is it hard for some to
adopt the practice? One thing that occurs to me is that maybe it isn't
really that easy to write good tests. We've all seen examples of how to test
a function that returns the sum of x + y -- thanks a lot. It's a little
harder to create simulated http environments complete with cookies and
sessions -- though people (e.g., the ZF team) have done wonderful things to
make it easier -- and forsee all the use cases in a complex app. Evidence
for the proposition that it's hard to write an exhaustive set of tests is
that you have products like the Zend Framework which is unit-tested to death
before release, and then the next release brags that 171 bugs were fixed.

-- 
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/

The subtle source is clear and bright
The tributary streams flow through the darkness
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