43 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: Automated tests reduce debugging time
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date: 2025-04-01
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permalink: daily/2025/04/01/debugging
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tags:
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- software-development
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- automated-testing
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- test-driven-development
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cta: testing_course
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snippet: |
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Having automated tests reduces your debugging time.
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---
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In my [talk about automated testing and test-driven development][0], I speak about a custom module I wrote for a client's Drupal project.
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It was to integrate with a third-party job application system that they would log into and enter information via a form (similar to Drupal's node forms) that they wanted to appear on the Drupal website.
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Once submitted, the system would send a POST request to an endpoint provided by the custom module. The module would process it and create the job node with the appropriate field values.
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I wrote automated tests and did test-driven development.
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Everything worked great for a few weeks or months.
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Later, we had a message from the client saying the integration was broken and we needed to fix it.
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I don't think I'd worked on this module for a while, but I was concerned that a Drupal core update or another change could have caused a regression.
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The first thing I did was run the tests I'd written and verify they still passed, which they did.
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This confirmed that as long as the data was being sent in the expected format, the node would be created and the integration would work.
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Due to an upstream issue, the data was no longer in the expected format, which meant the node could not be created.
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Once it was fixed, everything started working again.
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My debugging time was practically zero as I was able to rely on my tests and that they were still passing.
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I could confidently tell the client that the issue wasn't with our code and must've been an third-party issue.
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Writing tests takes some time, but having tests saves time.
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[0]: {{site.url}}/presentations/tdd-test-driven-drupal
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