Comments on: How To Test Legacy Applications http://www.brandonsavage.net/how-to-test-legacy-applications/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-test-legacy-applications The personal blog of Brandon Savage. Contains entries of a personal and professional nature focusing on PHP, Apple, LAMP, MySQL and Washington, DC. Wed, 15 May 2013 14:54:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2-alpha By: Hikari http://www.brandonsavage.net/how-to-test-legacy-applications/#comment-13098 Hikari Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:47:56 +0000 http://www.brandonsavage.net/?p=2244#comment-13098 I didn’t understand this article at all. By the title, I understood legacy as software that’s already developed, had no test plan, and now must be tested all of a sudden. We’d then need to manually test it all interacting with its UI, or inspect it for strategic places to add automated tests (like find loose coupled classes that can be unit tested).

Then you started explaining a strategy for building a new software architecture that’s test friendly. Isn’t the software finished and legacy? :P

Anyway, I see tests as a very important part of planning and also as the easiest part of specification. I hate testing, so I love automated tests.

In Java it’s very easy to build architectures that are easy to automate tests. Just divide the software in components and immediately design their interfaces, and we’re ready to start developing test units that will run on these interfaces. TDD.

But in PHP it’s way harder. PHP implies outputting to browser and isn’t easy to change output stream. It doesn’t have any sort of logging feature, like java.util.logging. And I myself don’t like these tools that must be added in production code to receive a bool and build a report.

I’d love more articles about testing in PHP!

]]> By: Martin Hlaváč http://www.brandonsavage.net/how-to-test-legacy-applications/#comment-9325 Martin Hlaváč Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:03:31 +0000 http://www.brandonsavage.net/?p=2244#comment-9325 There is one major problem with Zend. Code built on it uses static calls and if developers on legacy app loved this pattern then one object changes behavior of completely different objects which really makes it hard to test anything.

In this case you have to use functional tests as you mentioned in your post. You have to write functional tests for your application’s frontend anyway, because sometimes unit tests won’t be enough to find some specific problems.

Anyway… great article, keep it comming i like your ideas and way of your programming

]]>