PHPUnit Archives - Steve Grunwell

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The True Meaning of Code Coverage

May 29, 2025

Whether you’re auditing third-party libraries or trying to toughen up your own test suites, you’ve likely come across a project boasting “100% code coverage”. It just sounds so official, right? 100% of this code is covered by automated tests, so it must be good!

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that a high percentage of code coverage does generally reflect an above-average effort to test the code—I’d much rather use a library with 60% code coverage than 15% (or zero!), wouldn’t you?

The bad news is that a high percentage of code coverage doesn’t mean that the code is necessarily working the way it’s supposed to!

In this post, we’re going to look at what code coverage really means as a metric (specifically within the context of PHP, but these lessons should be broadly applicable), as well as several ways that code coverage can give you a false sense of confidence.

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Streamlining your test suite with PHPUnit Data Providers

August 2, 2018

In Code

In every testing talk I’ve attended (or given), there’s one stand-out feature that often has the audience saying “whoa, I had no idea you could do that!” No, it’s sadly not “hey look, you can reliably build quality software with a much lower chance of defects or regressions!”, but rather the inevitable use of PHPUnit’s Data Providers.

With Data Providers, our test suite can become more readable and maintainable while making it trivial to add new testing scenarios. Best of all? PHPUnit ships with Data Providers right out of the box.

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Writing WooCommerce Extensions with Confidence

January 24, 2018

In WordPress

If you haven’t heard, Liquid Web is now the first company offering Managed WooCommerce hosting, which is a huge step forward in the world of WordPress-oriented e-commerce. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few weeks working on WooCommerce extensions that help improve the experience and performance of WooCommerce.

One of the main WooCommerce extensions I’ve been working on is WooCommerce Custom Orders Table, which takes the WooCommerce 3.x CRUD concept to its next logical point: storing order data in a custom, flat table instead of scattered throughout post meta. Mindsize worked with other members of my team at Liquid Web to build the initial version of the plugin, then I came in to fix a few bugs.

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Deeper Testing with PHPUnit Markup Assertions

October 25, 2017

In Code

In a perfect world, every piece of software would have automated tests. As soon as we change a line, we as developers would know what, if anything, broke in our application and where we need to look to fix it. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, so we get by doing what we can.

Still, we can look to our image of the perfect world and draw from it, molding and shaping what we do have to closer resemble what we’ve been longing for.

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My Laravel Tests were Failing because of my App URL

September 21, 2017

In Laravel

In my role as Senior Software Engineer at Liquid Web, I’ve gotten to get back to my roots of not only doing WordPress, which has been great. In particular, I’m getting back into Laravel, getting to build real web applications in an environment that makes testing a breeze (aside: if you haven’t checked out Adam Wathan’s Test Driven Laravel course, I cannot recommend it enough!).

I ran into an interesting problem today, however, when I updated the APP_URL variable in my .env file: running my [previously 100% green] test suite, I was getting random errors and failures within my feature tests that I hadn’t been seeing before. Controller actions weren’t responding properly, model relationships weren’t always behaving, and redirects following actions were hit-or-miss.

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