Enabling Automated Drupal Website Testing Using Behavior Driven Development

One of the efficient ways to write tests for codes is adapting behavior-driven development (BDD) as it uses the language of real humans which is easier to understand. Behavior-driven development in Drupal encourages collaboration among developers, testers, and customer representatives in a software project. It emerged from test-driven development (TDD) focusing on adding test coverage to the website or application.

Behavior-driven development combines the general techniques and principles of TDD with ideas from domain-driven design, object-oriented analysis and design. It provides software development and management teams with shared tools and a shared process to collaborate on software development.

Understanding Automated Testing

Pre-scripted tests are run automatically to compare actual and expected results for the website or application. Newly implemented alterations may tend to disturb regular functioning. Automated testing helps in regression tests and executing iterative tasks. 

The Drupal Extension to Behat and Mink provides Drupal-specific functionality for the Behavior-Driven Development testing frameworks of Behat and Mink.

What is Behat?

Behat is an open-source Behavior-driven development framework that helps in test automation and delivering software that matters. It was created in PHP with high extensibility as the majority of functions can be enhanced or replaced using a magnificent extension system. A provision for a Drupal extension offers an integration layer between Behat, Mink and Drupal. This can be used to add feature files to the feature directory of the repository that includes human-readable steps for testing something. Behat is the best option for behavior driven testing in Drupal.

Behat and Mink allow you to describe the behavior of a website in plain, but stylized English language. You can further turn that description into an automated test that will visit the site and perform each step you describe. Such functional tests can help site builders ensure that the added value they’ve created when building a drupal site continues to behave as expected after any sort of site change – security updates, new module versions, changes to custom code, etc.

The Drupal Extension to Behat and Mink assists in the performance of these common Drupal testing tasks:

• Set up test data with Drush or the Drupal API
• Define theme regions and test data appears within them
• Clear the cache, log out, and other useful steps
• Detect and discover steps provided by contributed modules and themes

 

You should meet the system requirements below to install and run Behat tests:

• PHP version higher than 5.3.5
• Java installation as it is required for Selenium
• Command-line cURL tool
• Latest version of Selenium Server

 

There are different ways you can do Behat installation:

Behat installation can be done in two specific ways:

• Stand-alone installation

  You can go for a stand-alone installation when you want your tests and testing environment to be portable, from local development to CI server, to client infrastructure.

 

• System-wide installation

  With a system-wide installation, you can maintain a single copy of the testing tool set and use it for multiple test environments. Configuration is a bit more complex than stand-alone installation but provides flexibility and ease-of-maintenance.

 

Conclusion

Behat is a tool for enabling quick and effective automated testing in Drupal development that helps in making your websites faster, better and more efficient.

At Altudo, we have an expert team working on test-driven development with Drupal. You can contact us at marketing@altudo.co to obtain best results of automated testing through Behat for your website and applications.