Testing WordPress & Code Review @ Cascadia PHP 2019

Last year, I was fortunate enough to spend a week and a half on the West Coast, splitting time between Portland, OR and San Diego, CA for the first installments of two new community PHP conferences: Cascadia PHP and WavePHP.

Sadly, WavePHP isn’t happening this year, but I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be returning to Portland for Cascadia PHP 2019!

Confidently Testing WordPress

This year, I’ll be doing a relatively-new talk, Confidently Testing WordPress, which premiered back at WordCamp Dayton 2019.

WordPress is a tightly-coupled system, representing over a decade and a half of ideas, decisions, technological shifts, and ideological struggles. There’s a lot of history to be parsed and often the simplest task can have unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, automated testing is one of the best ways to ensure software can be released regularly with high confidence and low risk of regressions. Sadly, the leap from “building WordPress plugins” to “building WordPress plugins with tests” is often viewed as a challenging hurdle. Luckily, there are tools to set up a test harness within an existing codebase with ease.

This talk introduces the fundamentals of automated testing, especially within the context of WordPress. After developing an understanding why automated testing is so critical, attendees will learn how to begin testing their plugins and themes, using features found both in PHPUnit and the WordPress core testing framework, to build and release quality software.

If you’ve seen my Testing Like You’ve Never Tested Before (Because You Haven’t) talk that’s been making the rounds, some of this will be familiar. However, rather than focusing on testing strategies and tools for PHP as a whole, this sister-talk dives deeper into testing WordPress, specifically.

Code Review: For Me & You

Unfortunately, my friend Jessica had something come up, so she recommended me to the organizers to give my code review talk in her place.

https://twitter.com/JessicaMauerhan/status/1173611595227947008?s=20

On the surface, the idea of code review is a no-brainer: why wouldn’t we want a second set of eyes on our code, especially before deploying to production?

As we peel back the layers, however, we find that the topic of code review is much more nuanced. How detailed should the review be? Who is qualified to perform the review (hint: it’s not just senior developers)? Can we afford to take another developer away from their project to review this one? What steps can we take to ensure reviews are constructive, rather than demoralizing?

Attendees will gain deeper insight into some of the arguments for and against systemic, peer code review, as well as pick up some useful tools to make code review a natural part of their teams’ workflow.

I hope to see you this September in Portland, Oregon!