Bill Shupp Software engineer, photographer, musician, space geek

Pragmatic tips for unit testing in PHP

Recently I've been hearing a lot of differing opinions about unit testing.  Some people just don't believe in it at all, others think the value it provides is only part of the picture, and that its cost should be weighed accordingly.  Some think that 100% test coverage should be the goal for high quality software.  I personally think the cost of unit testing 100% of your code is worth it, but only if you can do it efficiently.  And that's the catch; there's a learning curve to become proficient at unit testing, especially with PHPUnit, the most prominent unit testing framework for PHP.  Unit testing should never take more than 20-30% of your overall coding time, if you do it right.