Testing software is one of those topics that people often talk about, write about (books even), and evangelize during conferences, meet ups, and so on. And rightly so – testing is one of the most important aspects of building something that’s going to be used by others.
Sometimes though, I wonder if we don’t do more talking about testing than actual testing.
By that, I mean we all understand its importance and I’d venture to say that we’re relatively familiar with the tools that are available for testing, but the act of testing in and of itself is kind of a beast:
- It requires that you install additional software on to your computer
- It requires that you learn how to write tests using the above software
- It introduces more code thus more time into a project which doesn’t always translate well for stake holders
- …and more
In short, there’s a lot working against it. I get it. Even more so, we talk about all kinds of testing – anything from unit tests to beta tests to release candidates and so on. All of these are important and they all have their place, and testing in WordPress is no different.
That said, there’s at least one method of testing that I think is applicable but rarely employed when it comes to creating themes or plugins. It’s an intermediate step of testing that I would say fits between user testing and beta testing: Use case testing (perhaps there’s a better title for it, but that’s what I have for this post).
