The QaFoo blog has a post to their blog introducing page objects and how they're useful in functional testing to help provide a "decoupling" from the actual frontend.

A while ago we wrote about writing acceptance tests (end-to-end tests) with Mink and PHPUnit. While this is a great set of tools for various applications such tests tend be susceptible to changes in the frontend. And the way they break is often hard to debug, too. Today I will introduce you to Page Objects which can solve some of these problems.

The basic idea behind a Page Object is that you get an object oriented representation of your website. The Page Objects maps the HTML (or JSON) to an object oriented structure you can interact with and assert on. This is more initial work then than writing tests with PHPUnit and Mink directly, but it can be worth the effort.

They use the Mnk testing tool to simulate a browser and some previously shared functionality to lay the foundation. From there they write up a first test using a "Login" page object and processing the username/password handling of the page. They show how to implement a custom page object with a bit of additional logic and put it to use in processing the request. They also include an update when, for example, a site is switched from Twig templates to a React.js component and how the Page object would need to be refactored for the update.

The QaFoo blog has a new post today showing you how to use Mink with PHPUnit. Mink is a testing tool that allows you to write tests as if they were happening through a browser.

Another day for a short PHPUnit trick. If you want to use PHPunit to control a browser for functional or acceptence tests, then you can easily do this using the Mink library. Mink is well known from the Behat community to facilitate Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), but it is a standalone library that can be used with PHPUnit just as easily.

This is more flexible than using dedicated browser abstractions such as Selenium directly from PHPunit, because you can switch between different implementations or even run tests with multiple implementations using the same code base.

They start with the command you'll need to get Mink installed via Composer (a simple require) and come example code for a test on the Wikipedia site (the page about PHP). They then refactor this a bit to remove the boostrapping of the Mink client into a reusable trait, making it simpler to use in other tests. They also refactor the test to use the trait and include the phpunit.xml configuration needed to run it.

On the Lakion blog there's a post showing you how to debug your application's Behat tests easily as a part of your continuous integration process. In thieir case, they were trying to figure out why builds were breaking on a Travis-CI build instance.

Debugging Behat scenarios while using Mink to simulate the user is not always an easy job. Especially, if they are run on Continuous Integration server. That is why I came up with an idea to make it easier. During repairing our javascript test suite on Sylius everything went as bad as it could go. There were many errors that happened on Travis, but I was not able to reproduce them locally. [...] MinkDebugExtension was written to speed up that boring and tiring part of debugging on CI server. It consists of two parts: Behat extension and useful scripts.

The extension fires after failed steps and makes a log of the issue with content needed to recreate the issue (including possible screenshots). He also describes the scripts that come with it to help you browse through the results, uploading the resulting logs and screenshots to a place for public consumption.

In this new post to his site Chris Hartjes shares a tool he's found to help with automated front-end testing for web applications - BrowserMobProxy

At work I have been involved with an effort to put some automated front-end testing in place. The combination of Behat, Mink running tests using PhantomJS is a good one for this. Open source, easy to configure, handles JavaScript-heavy pages reasonably well. There was just one wrinkle in our plans: our use of local host files. [...] So clearly what was needed [to solve a hosts file switching issue] was a proxy. After doing a little bit of digging around I found a solution: BrowserMobProxy.

He briefly introduces the tool and helps you get it installed (as well as the library you'll need to interface with the proxy). His library hooks into a running PhantomJS instance and the BrowserMobProxy, generates the right hosts file (not included) and continues on with the tests.

On the Inviqa TechPortal today there'a a new post from Konstantin Kudryashov showing you how to use Mink for functional testing (an extension of Behat) of you web application.

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.

In this new post to his blog Shashikant Jagtap talks about a new extension for Behat (the BDD testing tool) that makes working with Mink even easier - MinkExtension.

'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 his "Let's BDD" blog Shashikant Jagtap looks at the integration of Saucelabs and Behat for even more functionality when creating BDD tests.

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.

Earlier this month Shashikant Jagtap wrote up a post about a powerful combination in testing your applications - a "rockstar" combo of PHPUnit + Behat/Mink + Page Object to give you a great foundation for BDD (behavior-driven) testing.

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.

Konstantin Kudryashov has linked to a new tool that's adds BehatMink browser abstraction library for your Symfony2 project as a part of the Behat project (a BDD testing tool for PHP).

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.