Automated testing is big news these days. There's hardly a PHP conference happening without a talk on testing automation or derivative methodologies. TDD (Test-Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) are all around us. So why should you care about all this? [...] The more complex an application becomes, the harder it is to be sure that each new feature or bug fix won't break the system, and that decreases your overall confidence in your work as developer. That's exactly the reason why you need automated testing - to be confident that you're not breaking important parts of an application.

For his examples he uses a simple Silex-based application (found here on github) that just shows a main page and an "add article" page that returns a preview when submitted. He shows how to get Behat/Mink installed and how to bootstrap PHPUnit to allow you to execute your tests. Also included is a sample test that clicks the "Add Article" link, runs a few checks and fills in some data. The form is submitted and the "preview" page is checked for valid results.

'MinkExtension' has been just released which has additional services for Behat. This extension has 'Mink' instance for your 'FeatureContext' and 'SubContext'. UI testers would be happy now, as they don't need to create Mink instance every time in order to use Mink API's.

He points you to an example application you can use to follow along. He includes the commands needed to install the dependencies via Composer and get this extension working (note: it requires PHP 5.4 for some of the traits stuff. If you don't want to use that, comment out the "TraitedFeatureContext.php" file). Also included are the commands to execute the tests with a Selenium server and a list of a few handy new things this extension enables.

On the occasion of Selenium Conference, I met with Noah Sussman talking about "Selenium In the Enterprise: What Went Right, What Went Wrong (So Far)" and one of his slides indicated that, team using Behat and Mink for the functional testing at Etsy. Noah then introduced me to Laura Beth who setup Behat/Mink and SauceLabs integration. Behat-Sauce configuration by Laura Beth is very easy to use. Now, we will see this in action.

Shashikant shows how to clone the github repository for the behat-suacelabs tool Etsy uses, use Composer to get all of the needed dependencies and a sample set of tests showing a sample set of Scenarios and their matching features (code). You can watch a video of the result here.

Last month, we had discussion about implementing page object pattern in Behat/Mink framework at London Behat Users meetup. Page object pattern is a cool way to make tests maintainable, reusable and readable. Everyone was interested to know more about Page Object Pattern. In this short tutorial, we will implement Mink and PHPUnit combination for functional testing. Mink and PHPUnit combined with Pageness (Page Object) can be used for maintainable and readable tests.

He assumes that you might not have all the tools needed installed, so he walks you through the setup/install of PHPUnit, the PHPUnit-Mink framework and both the Sahi and Selenium drivers. He includes a basic directory structure for the testing and shows how to create some Page Object classes that extend the default TestCase and make calling the remote resource simple. He also includes the steps needed to execute the tests via PHPUnit.

You can now test your Symfony2 applications with PHPUnit and Mink, thanks to brand new MinkBundle.

This new tool provides a clean API, support for Symfony2's test.client browser emulator and support for the Goutte and Sahi browser emulators as well. In the README on it's github page, they've provided some sample code snippets that show how to register the namespaces, add it to your application kernel/add the config, enable the GoutteDriver and SahiDriver and, of course, write a first test.