Testing in Drupal 8: There is More Than One Way

Drupal web development is extremely popular nowadays. This CMS is famously known for its scalability and fantastic modular system. Still, any website or application needs to be thoroughly tested no matter what technology it has been built with. What types of tests should be conducted with Drupal 8?

If your objective is testing class methods, then you should write Unit tests. With Drupal 8, they are created in the PHPUnit framework and are incredibly fast-executing. One demerit of unit tests is that there can be lots of mocking to be done if a class has too many dependencies.

One way to solve this problem is to create Kernel tests, which are used for testing module APIs and are also created in PHPUnit. In the case of Kernel tests, Drupal gets installed with a certain number of features only, and you should indicate which features your test requires.

For testing UI, the best approach would be to install the Drupal Behat Extension rather than write Browser or JavaScript tests. The main reason: you can use a browser such as Chrome locally, and Jenkins can use PhantomJS. So, unlike JavaScript tests, debugging Behat tests is far more enjoyable and easier.

Any Drupal development company should strive to release bug-free applications. We hope that our recommendations can help you achieve this goal.