php-testing_skill

Overview

This skill teaches practical PHP testing mastery covering PHPUnit 11, Pest 3, TDD, mocking strategies, integration testing, and CI/CD pipelines. It focuses on actionable patterns, code examples, and configuration to help teams write reliable, fast, and maintainable tests. Use it to adopt test-driven workflows, reduce flakiness, and reach practical coverage goals.

How this skill works

The skill inspects your testing needs by topic (phpunit, pest, mocking, tdd, integration, ci-cd) and level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) to deliver focused guidance and examples. It provides module-based learning objectives, concrete code snippets (PHPUnit, Pest, Mockery), error codes and recovery steps, retry rules for transient failures, and CI/CD configurations for automated test runs. Recommendations map to common PHP frameworks (Laravel, Symfony) while remaining framework-agnostic by default.

When to use it

• Adopting unit and integration testing for a new or existing PHP project
• Migrating tests to PHPUnit 11 or Pest 3 and modern PHP attributes
• Implementing TDD practices or training a team on test-first workflows
• Introducing mocking and stubbing patterns to isolate components
• Adding or improving CI/CD test pipelines with coverage and parallel runs

Best practices

• Start small: write a failing test, implement minimal code, refactor (TDD loop)
• Prefer clear test structure: setup, action, assertion; keep tests deterministic
• Use mocks and spies to isolate external dependencies; avoid over-mocking core logic
• Run tests in CI with consistent PHP versions and seeded environments; upload coverage artifacts
• Measure and aim for meaningful coverage (target ≥80%) while prioritizing critical paths

Example use cases

• Beginner module: learn PHPUnit test case structure and basic assertions for PHP 8.2+
• Intermediate: use data providers, fixtures, and Mockery for repository/service tests
• Advanced: enable parallel execution, coverage reporting, and mutation testing for confidence
• Pest example: write expressive feature tests for user registration with database assertions
• CI/CD: configure GitHub Actions to run tests, collect coverage, and fail fast on regressions