Automated Testing

If you’ve read all the chapters of this book from the very beginning, you’ll have not only an idea of the theoretical background but also a good set of tools at hand that will help you write great PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) code. Of course, you can just go and refactor all the code there is, probably using some automated code manipulation capabilities our tools offer.

You will not write perfect code on the first try—it usually takes several iterations until you are satisfied. And since you never stop learning, you will refactor parts of your code even months or years later. Yet even the most sophisticated code quality tools will not prevent you from having to do one tedious task: testing your code after you’ve made changes to ensure that it still works as expected. That is why in this chapter, we want to introduce you to automated testing.

Through automated testing, you will be able to verify that your improvements to the code...