Tag: php

Unit testing tips by examples in PHP

In these times, the benefits of writing unit tests are huge. I think that most of the recently started projects contain any unit tests. In enterprise applications with a lot of business logic, unit tests are the most important tests, because they are fast and can us instantly assure that our implementation is correct. However, I often see a problem with good tests in projects, though these tests’ benefits are only huge when you have good unit tests. So in these examples, I will try to share some tips on what to do to write good unit tests.

Circuit Breaker

In most systems, we use remote calls. Many factors may have an impact on these remote calls e.g. network latency, server availability and so on. So we should assume that something can go wrong. These calls can be potential bottlenecks, we don’t want user waiting for the response from the server very long, because external API is very slow or not available. Also if we have a few services which communicate with each other we shouldn’t aggravate the situation when one of them has too much traffic and slow down significantly. So how to do it correctly?

Mutation testing – we are testing tests

Writing tests should assure us that the code created by us is working correctly. Often we point out the code coverage factor and if we have 100% we can say that implemented solutions are correct. Are you sure? Maybe there is a tool that can give us more accurate feedback?

Entity should always be valid

Very often in projects using Doctrine, in entity there are mapping for fields also for each field there are getters and setters. In addition, for each field, we have validation annotations, and forms are validating on the entity. Is this the right approach?