The PHP Rountable podcast has posted its latest episode featuring a discussion about Behat and acceptance testing in your PHP applications. This time host Sammy Powers is joined by Jessica Mauerhan and Konstantin Kudryashov.

We chat about the open-source Behavior-Driven Development framework called Behat. We get a brief overview of how Behat can help us write more reliable code and also explore some best-practices when writing automated tests.

You can catch this episode in a few different ways - either using the in-page audio or video player or you can watch the live recording (Google Hangout) directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released and when the next shows will be recorded.

The QaFoo blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how to work with PHPUnit and database testing for acceptance testing of your application. Acceptance testing (or integration testing) generally exercises the tests with live data from a database rather that stubbed or mocked data in true unit testing.

Most of us do not use PHPUnit solely for Unit Tests but we also write Integration or Acceptance Tests with PHPUnit. One very common question then is how to interact with the database correctly in those tests. Let me show you the different options and their trade offs...

There are multiple aspects of database tests where our decision has impact on test atomicity and test runtime. All decisions boil down to: More test atomicity leads to longer test runs, and we can buy test speed by omitting test atomicity.

They talk more about the time added for testing with database functionality included and where running them might be most appropriate (local vs on the CI server). The article then talks about one of the main decisions around doing a full data/schema reset or just removing data when the tests start or end. They then get into this last point - where the reset should happen, before or after the tests are executed. They talk in detail about each option, breaking it down into a few options: before each test, before each test class or before the whole test run. The post ends with a section talking about "mocking the database away", a method usually used in traditional unit testing but points out that this can be highly prone to errors, especially if you attempt to replace one database system with another (like replacing MySQL with SQLite).

The Master Zend Framework site continues their series covering the creation of a Docker-based testing environment in this second part highlighting the addition of testing support.

In the first part in this series on developing web applications using Docker, we saw how to create a local development environment using Docker; one ideally suited to creating Zend Expressive (or any other kind of PHP-based web application). But, what we didn’t cover was how to handle testing in a Docker-based environment.

[...] How do you run tests when working with Docker containers? After a bit of searching, I found that it’s not that difficult. But you have to use the right combination of commands.

Since unit tests can be run locally if need be (they shouldn't need any resources from the service if they're true unit tests) he focuses on acceptance testing. For his examples he uses the Codeception testing tool. He walks you through the setup of some simple tests based on the "home" page functionality of the Zend Expressive skeleton application. With that in place, he shows the updates that will need to be made to execute the tests from outside the instance via a "docker exec" call. The post finishes with a look at adding two other tools to the mix as well: Make and Phing.

Mohamed Said has written up an article about acceptance testing a Laravel+Vue.js application with the help of the Selenium WebDriver functionality.

The good thing about writing tests at a mature stage of the project is that many of the basic parts of the application are settled down, major changes have slowed, so deciding the shape of tests can happen in a more solid way. Testing too early, in my opinion, leads to the need of changing tests whenever you change functionality, so it’s work * 2.

This post is about a single type of tests and I think it’s the most interesting one.

He starts with a brief description of what acceptance testing is for those not familiar with the concept. He then gets to the Selenium WebDriver, provides a summary on that as well and points out the main tool they use for their tests: the Javascript driver it provides. the syntax on the driver is a bit difficult to follow so they also suggest layering Nightwatch.js on top to make for simpler, cleaner and easier to read tests. There's also information and (acceptance) testing the backend of the application with various tools, ultimately deciding on the use of Codeception.

In this tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog Younes Rafie shows you how to combine Selenium with PHPUnit to do acceptance testing on your application. Where PHPUnit and unit testing is more about testing the "pieces" of your application, acceptance testing it more about checking the interface and functionality for correctness according to requirements.

Testing is a really wide subject, whether it be unit testing, functional testing, acceptance testing, etc. In this article, we’re going to see how you can do acceptance testing using Selenium. I will use a practical example to illustrate a real use case. I will assume that you already know how to do unit testing using PHPUnit, or that you at least have a grasp of what it’s all about.

He starts with a few definitions around what acceptance testing is and how Selenium can help in performing these evaluations. He uses a simple user registration page for his tests and includes commands to get PHPUnit+Selenium installed as well as an alias to start the Selenium server. He then creates a first test case, setting up the Selenium "browser" to use in later requests. He then gets to testing the page itself, setting up some data providers for the content to inject into the form both valid and invalid. He shows how to work with the DOM inside of your tests and making both a valid and invalid form submission. He also shows how to use a different browser (he defaults to Firefox) and how to check of the current document is ready for evaluation, that is if all Javascript has fired and finished.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial posted from Andrew Perkins about acceptance testing with Codeception, an alternative testing framework that's been gaining popularity in the PHP community.

Codeception is a multi-featured testing framework for PHP. It can handle unit, functional, and acceptance testing of web applications and it’s powered by the already very popular PHPUnit testing framework.

Codeception allows us to test different kinds of user perspectives and site scenarios while they are visiting our app to ensure a pleasant user experience. By testing multiple scenarios, we can simulate a user’s natural flow throughout our application to make sure the app is working as expecting.

The tutorial guides you through the process of getting Codeception up and running and creating a first test. The example test hits a basic PHP-enhanced HTML page to uppercase a given string. They show how to create the test skeleton and flesh it out with a test for the page load as well as the form submission.

On the Codeception site today there's a new post that compares their tool, Behat and PHPUnit for testing your applications.

This is guest post by Ragazzo. He uses Behat as well as Codeception for making his project better. He was often asked to do a comparison between Codeception, Behat, and PhpUnit. In this post he explains the commons and different parts of this products.

The author talks some about the difference between functional/acceptance tests and how they fit in with behavior driven development. He includes some examples of Behat test formats (Gherkin) and how it can be used for both the functional and acceptance side of things. He also talks some about why he prefers Codeception over Behat(+Mink) for his testing. A sample Codeception test is included, showing a login form check.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the Codeception testing tool to perform some acceptance/functional testing of your application.

What happens if you have more tests then zergs in the swarm? Really much more. You should find a way to control and manage them. In this article I’ll share some hints and best practices you may use writing acceptance tests. I’ll use Codeception testing framework to illustrate the best practices, but surely, they can be ported to any acceptance framework you use for testing.

He introduces the Codeception tool and some of the features it includes. He recommends using it to coordinate all of your testing as it can handle PHPUnit and Selenium tests as well as generate its own code coverage reports. He includes some code showing a basic test, making a request to a page, checking for contents and clicking on some links. He also shares a few design patterns using the tool - Page Object and Controller test examples.

On the Web Builder Zone (of DZone) Giorgio Sironi has posted an article looking at the Zend_Test component of the Zend Framework and how to use it for acceptance test-driven development.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development is an Agile technique that extends the test-first approach to the development of the front end of an application. The mechanics of Acceptance TDD are clear: first you write a test which defines the goal of your development, which is basically the feature you're adding to your application. As with all TDD variants, this test must fail.

With the help of the Zend_Test component, your tests can execute through the full MVC stact of your application (including views) to check to see if the resulting content matches certain criteria. He includes a few code examples showing content searching (contains), validating the query string and checking for a redirect.

From the Zend Developer Zone, there's a tutorial covering acceptance testing of web applications, specifically using PHPUnit and Selenium.

In this article I introduce the topic of Acceptance Testing (aka Functional Testing), something more PHP programmers should be starting to practice. I'm sure many of us are well aware of Unit Testing and even Integration Testing so where does this third wheel come into play for web applications given our growing obsession with Web 2.0 and AJAX and how does it differ from the former two practices? Below I'll explain this.

They start by asking "Why acceptance testing?" at all with an answer of "it's not about isolated testing, but testing as a whole". The rest of the article is broken up into several parts:

• Of User Stories and Acceptance Tests
• The Iteration Plan
• Preparing For Acceptance Testing (setting up PHPUnit and Selenium)
• Writing And Running The Acceptance Tests
• How to run the tests

In their example they show how to validate that a login on the site works as expected (including interacting with a form on the page).