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Functional Testing: what to test?

I’ve been working with PHPUnit’s SeleniumTestCase. I worked out some good login switching for the two authentication schemes I’m working with. Then came time to actually write some tests. But what to test?

Unit testing tests a single class. A singular piece of code or a unit. I typically write unit tests for Models only. Integration testing tests the interaction of multiple units or units with multiple resources. I’ve been thinking of these as sort of testing the Controller. That’s a little simplified, but it’s not really something I have a framework for with Yii and PHPUnit. Functional testing likewise has varying definitions. Some people like to focus on the testing of “functional requirements of the product” and some people have a more simplistic view of it, that it’s just automating tests of the views — so it can be used as integration testing. I personally think the former is a better way to look at it, but it also sounds a little douchey to say it out loud.

So I’m totally agile. I’ve got all these user stories. And all these tasks. What I’m doing is writing the functional tests in terms of the user stories and tasks. This is sort of BDD, except I’m ignoring the excessive mocking, which basically makes the BDD tests unit tests, and doing the whole shebang at once. Shebang isn’t being picked up by spellcheck. #!

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