Intro to Testing @ Nomad PHP

This January, I’ll be kicking off the new year giving my second-ever Nomad PHP talk: Testing Like You’ve Never Tested Before (Because You Haven’t).

Testing software in an automated fashion is one of the best ways to guarantee quality, reduce bugs, and prevent regressions in our code, and is a prerequisite to operating in a Continuous Integration environment. Unfortunately, the most difficult parts of testing come right at the beginning: scaffolding a test suite and writing our very first tests. For those who are new to automated testing, these hurdles can prove overwhelming.

This talk covers the fundamentals of testing, in a beginner-friendly way. We’ll discuss how testing makes software better, the various levels of the Automation Pyramid, how to scaffold some basic unit and integration tests, and discuss the characteristics of great tests.

If you haven’t attended a Nomad PHP meetup before, it started as “the user group for people without a local user group”, but now has evolved into a monthly gathering of some of the top names in PHP. I’ve spoken at Nomad PHP once before in 2016, and am honored to have been invited back!