Testing

->refundedTwice(). That is the line from Laravel 8 I care about, and it is nowhere on the release page. Jetstream gets the screenshots. Class-based factories and the queue changes get my attention, because both are about production. Factories used to be closures registered through a global function. Now they are classes with states: Order::factory() ->paid() ->has(OrderItem::factory()->count(3)) ->create(); Test data quality decides test quality. Most integration suites on our project test the happy path fifty times, because the default factory returns a fresh, valid, boring record. The bugs live somewhere else. An order refunded twice. A user registered before the migration added the column. A subscription that expired in the middle of renewal. A factory state gives such a monster a name, and once the name exists, people write tests with it. Named ugly data is the cheapest test improvement I know. ...

Laravel 5.4 came out on Tuesday, and the first thing I installed was Dusk. Browser tests without a Selenium server: it talks to ChromeDriver directly, the API is fluent, and a failed test leaves a screenshot behind. My first test was the login path: $this->browse(function ($browser) { $browser->visit('/login') ->type('email', 'user@example.com') ->type('password', 'secret') ->press('Log in') ->assertPathIs('/home'); }); It passed on the third run. The first run failed because the button on the test box had different text. The second failed because a JS animation was slower than the wait. This is the normal life of a browser test. It sees the real application, and the real application moves. ...

Three lines in .travis.yml. That is the whole cost of knowing in July what will break on PHP 7 in December. php: - 5.6 - nightly matrix: allow_failures: - php: nightly Alpha builds are out, release is planned for this autumn, and production is on 5.6 and will stay there for a while. The build stays green on 5.6. The nightly job fails quietly in the corner and produces a list of future problems while nobody is under pressure to read it. ...