19 Aug 2009 10:58
Contributing to the manual
Žilvinas Šaltys <zilvinas.saltys <at> gmail.com>
2009-08-19 08:58:59 GMT
2009-08-19 08:58:59 GMT
Hello,
First of all I want to say that PHPUnit is an amazingly great opensource project. My company is quite new to PHPUnit so eventually we ended spending a lot of time reading the manual. You would probably agree that Mocks are a very important part of writing real world test cases.
From my own experience I know that Mocks are not the easiest part to understand at first. That's why I believe it's documentation should be really good.
Current Mocks documentation http://www.phpunit.de/manual/current/en/test-doubles.html and possible issues with it:
1. $this->getMock() parameters not explained.
2. with() is not in the 11.1 table and has no explanation.
3. There's no example with $this->expects($this->at(1))->method('foo')->with($mixed)->will($this->returnValue($mixed)); I believe it's a very important example that is somehow not easy to figure out for new people who have only the documentation to read. For example I remember how long it took me to grasp that at($key) is based per Mock invocation and not Method invocation and what strange error message get when you don't understand that :] Not to mention figuring out if it starts from 0 or 1.
4. Mocks extend the Mocked class. That is a very nice thing to know. This allows to mock protected methods? Which is also very nice to know.
5. You cannot mock private methods and maybe you shouldn't ?
I don't know if the PHPUnit documentation has any goals to explain not only how PHPunit works but also give an idea of how to test write tests. How to handle certain challenges.
I would be interested in helping to contribute to the manual, but couldn't find any guide how to contribute to it.
Thank you,
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