Add daily email for 01/04/25

source/_daily_emails/2025-04-01.md

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+---
+title: Automated tests reduce debugging time
+date: 2025-04-01
+permalink: daily/2025/04/01/debugging
+tags:
+  - software-development
+  - automated-testing
+  - test-driven-development
+cta: testing_course
+snippet: |
+  Having automated tests reduces your debugging time.
+---
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+I wrote automated tests and did test-driven development.
+
+Everything worked great for a few weeks or months.
+
+Later, we had a message from the client saying the integration was broken and we needed to fix it.
+
+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.
+
+The first thing I did was run the tests I'd written and verify they still passed, which they did.
+
+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.
+
+Due to an upstream issue, the data was no longer in the expected format, which meant the node could not be created.
+
+Once it was fixed, everything started working again.
+
+My debugging time was practically zero as I was able to rely on my tests and that they were still passing.
+
+I could confidently tell the client that the issue wasn't with our code and must've been an third-party issue.
+
+Writing tests takes some time, but having tests saves time.
+
+[0]: {{site.url}}/presentations/tdd-test-driven-drupal