Do I need tests?
In web development, we face an ever-changing environment. For instance, PHP follows a community release cycle in which we have a new PHP version every year and every major release has 3 years of security support. These new releases provide new features and code deprecations that affect our code.
If we want our software to stand the test of time, we need to keep improving it and fixing deprecations and old conventions.
We can manually test our extensions. For that, we need to replicate the environment and conditions we want to test our software in, but we can also add automatic testing to our coding process and have it done to some extent by a machine.
Manual testing is a good starting point and it’s the final testing method to guarantee our extension does exactly what we want. However, as we add more testing environments and our software grows, it takes too much time to perform manual testing in all our environments.