We’ve never had any sort of automated testing at Miami, so lets go build a place to run some tests
Starting Small but remember it will go bigger
I’m just starting to learn how to write and run some tests so lets just run them on my computer. I don’t need a big hub and several nodes to run hundreds of tests at a time lets just begin running one test at a time. So I want to start my automated testing adventure by verifying that a form launches correctly.
Writing automated tests with PHP
Miami is a PHP shop, everything we write, is in PHP, so I want to find a solution to do these tests that all of the developers can use. I also wanted to use something so that down the road when Product Owners started looking at “testing criteria” that they could understand. So first thing we discovered was Cucumber, I love the fact that everything in Cucumber is written in regular English.
# Comment
@tag
Feature: Eating too many cucumbers may not be good for you
Eating too much of anything may not be good for you.
Scenario: Eating a few is no problem
Given Alice is hungry
When she eats 3 cucumbers
Then she will be full
In order to use Cucumber with PHP we’ve started looking at Behat. Behat is considered an official Cucumber implementation in PHP so this is the way we are going to go to look at using PHP & Cucumber.
Behat
So now that we decided to use Behat so that anyone could write scenarios in English how would those scenarios interact with a browser. While doing the research it looks like Mink appears to be the way to go to interact with a browser.
Mink seems like a great option to interact with Selenium from a PHP application using Behat.