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I recently started fulfilling an agreement with Zend's Devzone to become a monthly article contributor. My writing style is decidedly verbose but I was wondering if anyone would care to review article #1 and let me know where you think I could improve things? I honestly trust folk here to critique me better than any other place around for PHP.
The first article is a short (at ~3200 words after editing - maybe not so short then) introduction to unit testing and a little TDD. Tends towards a discussion of theory with a few examples thrown in to keep it moving.
To keep things nice and simple for myself (I learned a lot on this forum over the years - payback time) I'm contributing 5-7% of my article fees to the Devnetwork forum monthly (whatever gets to an even Euro amount). I consider it a sort of free-for-all fund outside my normal salary so the other 95% is heading to various other donations for open source and charitable organisations. I could keep the cash, but it's not that much and I'd only be paying half it to Mr. Taxman anyway .
A good clearly written article. As ever, my complaint is that you spend a lot of time trying to convince people who probably aren't actually complaining or resisting. Probably the biggest questions that programmers have who are new to testing and are interested enough to read an Introduction article are: "What is the difference in the tools?" and "Show some real examples to get me started."
As far as the differences in the tools, no one has really done a side-by-side for the beginner to show they style of each tool -- a style rather than featuers is probably the reason they would choose one over another (that and ease of installation). And your example is a start, but obviously more is needed and testers tend to write examples that are either abstract or in the style of testing books, rather than common classes that PHP programmers might actually write.
Just read your article and I found it very well written and easy to understand. Your writing style is nice, directed at the "you" person, in a clear way.
I agree with Arborint in the sense that this article really begs for a (few) follow-ups! Now I'm convinced, show me how to do it
You have a very engaging writing style and you've convinced me to have another stab at TDD.
I'm hoping that you'll expand somewhat on the 'Knowing what to assert about in your tests is pretty much 90% of the battle' in future articles. That's the place where I really struggle and some general rules of thumb would be great.
Dude, your writing is amazing. Very clear, to the point, and understandable. Kudos on that, it's very hard to successfully relay thoughts accurately into writing; you seem to have done a nice job of that.
As following along with what the others have said, it does seem more targeted to those who do not test (and I guess rightfully so, since it is an introduction to testing). As an introduction you laid out the essential points: what it is, why you should do it, how you should do it, and when you should do it.
What I didn't see, and perhaps I'm missing, is how the "simple model" turns into a view. Do you just dump it out? If you add code, and run the test, how do you compare the results? Just by looking at them? Do you write/run tests that will compare earlier tests with newer ones?
Overall, very good article.
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