Search code examples
unit-testingtestinglaravel-5functional-testingphpunit

Testing process in Laravel application development

I'm following TDD technique in my new Laravel project. Thus I have a set of tests which cover my controllers, model classes, services, etc. Most of these tests are HTTP tests, so I stored them in the /tests/Feature directory. Additionally I have few unit tests, which cover quite specific methods, which are not (easily) reachable from the HTTP tests.

If I understand correctly, each HTTP test is a functional tests, because it covers a lot of classes included Controller. Should I in that situation separately create unit tests for each method in my project even if it is already covered by HTTP tests? If yes, what benefit can I take from it.

Thank you in advance for explanations.

Solution

  • The philosophy of creating unit tests is to test a small piece of your code, for example, if you have an API, so it only returns the list of 10 recent posts then I guess it's no need to create a unit test for that and it can be covered with writing the functional or HTTP tests. But let's assume you have an endpoint that the user uses that endpoint to upgrade his account from regular type to golden type so he/she can access more posts or videos. There will be definitely a lot of things going on in that endpoint, so yeah you need to write Unit tests in addition to functional tests. Also, one more thing is that when you write functional tests you should see it from the QA perspective, I can categorize it like this

    Functional/Http/Feature => [Validation Checks, Response Checks=>[The endpoint throw an error in different situations or return success if all goes well]]

    Unit => [Write the test for the small functions that they get called by that endpoint Or write the test for that endpoint and mock everything so you can get what you expect]

    Integration => [Write tests for the third party APIs or database persistence or caching persistence that you are using in your application]

    So if you have an endpoint and you are writing tests for that endpoint and your functional tests has covered some part of that endpoint logic then I guess it's not necessary to write more unit tests for it.