​Yves and I, we are going to participate in the Joomla! Automated Testing Code Sprint from the 28th of October until the 2nd of November 2015 in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. The goals of this event are as follow:
- create all system tests for com_weblinks
- prepare an action plan to migrate all the current system Tests
- prepare unit tests for PHP7 compatibility
- create the REST api tests for https://github.com/joomla-projects/webservices/
- enhance the quality of the Joomla system tests by doing a training with Davert, the creator of the Codeception Testing Framework
In case you are wondering what automated testing is, then the simple answer is. It's code that automatically determines if another code is running correctly or not :)
Imagine it like this. When feature X gets added to Joomla, a computer that runs the tests will automatically start a program/Browser and try to run the tests. A test might look like this: navigate to the administrator screen and try to login. Or navigate to the administrator section, login and then submit an article. If an error occurs when a test is run, then an error message gets sent to the contributors and they can then investigate what's going on.
Automated testing is most probably an overkill when you have simple scripts/programs where testing manually normally takes a second. But when you have a code base the size of Joomla a small changes in plugin X, can brake something in component Y, so it's really important to have a lot and good tests that could catch such issues early on. With our participation in this code sprint we hope to improve the Joomla code base by discovering such issues early on. This in term would improve the end product that you install on your servers :)
Since we need to commit full time to this, we won't be able to provide the usual level of support that you expect from us. That's why we've decided to close support from the 28th of October till the 3rd of November 2015.