According to Hayden James- The internet today is dominated by approx 83.5% of the websites that are developed in PHP, the widely accepted server-side scripting language. The PHP websites have a superlative response from the customers and it holds an outstanding position in web development. The growth rate graph of PHP web development has taken a steep ascending curve and continues to be buzzed among the clients and developers. The rich enhanced features of the latest versions of PHP some of which are: Introduction to the Superlative Operator, Null Coalesce Operator, Parse Errors, etc. have made the development easier. Still, the developers desire to have more tidy and clean, non-redundant, flawless, and bug-free code.
Getting started with such development is no more a big task for PHP developers who follow the Test Driven Development (TDD) technique from the initial phases of the project. Virtually, TDD is writing the piece of code in response to the test failures that occur. The Test-Driven Development practice first allows you to develop the test, then run the code so that the assertion becomes false, and then rewrite the code to pass the test.
The steps of TDD can be visualized as the following:
- Write a test.
- Run the test and let it fail.
- Now, write the code.
- Again run the test, so that the code passes only the test that it failed.
- Now repeat the above-mentioned steps until every test is passed.
- Refactor the code.
Test-Driven Development Lifecycle
The TDD lifecycle is a circular ring or a closed-loop that recurses until every test is passed by the code. TDD has three major phases-
- Red: Writing a test to fail.
- Green: Writing a code to pass the test.
- Refactoring or improving the quality of the code.
Test-Driven Development Principles
- KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) – This principle states that It is easier to detect and resolve bugs and improve the performance if the complexity of the code is less or it’s simpler. With TDD, you can always have better and easier pieces of code as compared to the development done otherwise.
- YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it) – Much often the developers in a lot of PHP development companies write codes in a project because they may need it later, and it results in bugs and warnings. In Test-Driven Development, you only draft to pass a particular test so the chances of errors reduce.
These acronyms form the basis for TDD. Although the code may become lengthy when development undergoes a TDD approach, it is more sorted and can secure your time if it is practiced in a correct way.
Benefits of TDD in PHP Web Development
- As you need to pass a single test every time, the requirement of each phase reduces to an extent and so the focus is narrow, increasing the concentration of the developers to develop a particular phase.
- TDDing in PHP provides you a written documentation of your project as the result of each test case is recorded and no extra time has to be spent on performing documentation of the project.
- Test-Driven Development makes the development of every module easier when compared to a whole and the intended code needs only refactoring to be done at the end.
- The periodically conducted comprehensive tests enhance the confidence of the developers and minimize the bugs or the error in the final code.
Bottom Line
Testing is crucial for the small and large enterprise applications that are developed in PHP web development companies. The engineers at Infowind Technologies craft your solutions by using the Test Driven Development technique and deliver you the best. Hopefully, the next time you design your solutions, you use TDD in your development process
