On the Delicious Brains site Ian has written up a lengthy post sharing how they automate their acceptance testing for their PHP applications.

Have you ever had the joy of carrying out acceptance tests? For our team at Delicious Brains, testing our releases, in the past, has been one of the most dreaded tasks on the to-do list. We hold our plugins to a high quality standard so it’s a must but manual tests are brain-numbingly tedious and can take hours of expensive developer time.

Recently, we decided it was high-time to fix that. [...] Read on for more about how the automation of testing our plugins ahead of release is shaping up – including how we manually tested in the past and a look at some of the automated acceptance tests we’ve already implemented.

He starts by defining what acceptance testing is and how they're different from other types of testing. He then shows the manual method they were using to run their tests previously and what prompted the move towards automation. He talks about the tools that they use for their automated testing including Codeception and Docker. Configurations and scripts are included that make the automation work and some of the issues they came across during the move from manual to automated processes.