Module Development

What Is Automated Testing? for Drupal 7

This page is archived

We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

Alternate resources

Testing in Drupal

Developers write tests for a variety of different reasons and understanding why, and how, writing tests can improve the quality of our code and our sanity helps motivate ourselves to write tests. The tests we write usually take one of two forms. Functional tests are used to test an applications behavior. When I click this link does it take me to the about page? Unit tests are used to verify the logic within a small segment, or unit, of code. When I call this function that is supposed to return a link with these specific parameters does it return the correct data? There are a ton of reasons that investing time and resources into writing automated tests is a big win in the long run and in this lesson we'll cover a bunch of them, including:

  • Eliminate repetitive tasks.
  • Improve overall stability of an application.
  • Ensure critical paths & edge cases function.
  • Reduce (not eliminate) the number of tests that need to be performed manually.

Types of Tests

There are are two main types of tests and we're going to be writing. Functional tests, and Unit tests.

Functional tests, also known as integration tests, test the functionality of a particular aspect of an application by simulating normal interaction with that system. In the case of web software this usually refers to simulating a user navigating and interacting with the website as if they where using their browser, keyboard, and mouse.

Unit testing is the art and practice of taking a small portion of code, a unit, and subjecting it to programmatic tests to prove its correctness. For example, testing a function that performs unit conversion by comparing a known input with an anticipated result.

UPDATE: This video references qa.drupal.org which is no longer in use. On Friday, October 23rd 2015 - qa.drupal.org received and processed it's last
test. The qa.drupal.org testbots have now been superseded by DrupalCI - and test results are now displayed directly on Drupal.org. While the mechanics are different now, the end result is still all patches to Drupal core are automatically tested.