Category: Articles (Page 125 of 258)

In following-up with yesterday’s post on unit testing WordPress code, I ended up wanting to say more than I did. There are are a lot of things to talk about (entire books cover TDD so what could a single post offer, anyway?).

Rather than try and tackle so many things in a handful of posts, I’ll stick with writing shorter posts on a handful of these topics.

Unit Test Existing Code (or Red-Green-Refactor)

One of the things that I wanted to discuss is the how unit testing can help drive architectural decisions. The challenge with the latter, though, is that part of writing tests often comes with retrofitting tests (or how we can unit test existing code).

And this is a topic all its own.

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In a few recent projects, I’ve been unit testing WordPress code and doing more general test-driven development than normal. I’m no stranger to TDD, but it’s not something I am religious about using. For me, it depends on the nature of the project.

There’s a lot of writing on TDD and its advantages, and a lot of people who use it swear by it. It builds a level of quality into a project and helps with adding new features, solving bugs, and modularizing code.

Unit testing WordPress code is a bit of a mixed bag, and it comes down to the fact that object-oriented code in WordPress is often tightly coupled to both the business logic and the WordPress API.

Since TDD can help designing the architecture of a project, it can help guide how we can create more testable classes.

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I’ve talked before about my idea of shipping a “strong 1.0” when it comes to working on projects for yourself or other people but what if that version is an embarrassing first release?

There’s a quote that many of us are familiar with (and that I’ve referenced here before, too):

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late.

It’s attributed to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

I think it’s something that’s good to remember, but sometimes I wonder if we use it as a crutch when shipping something and as a rationalization to cut corners.

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