Introducing Test Driven Development in PHP

Question

My workplace consists of a lot of cowboy coders. Many of them are junior. Which coincidentally contributes to a lot of code quality issues.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to best wane my team into using TDD (we can start with Unit tests, and move into regression tests, and later more automated testing).

Ultimately, I want us to learn more quickly from our mistakes, and produce better code and breed better developers.

I'm hoping there are some practical suggestions for how to introduce TDD to a team. Specifically, what tools are best to choose in the LAMP (php) stack.

Sorry if this question is too open-ended.

Answer 1

After going through this process four times now, I've found that any introduction of TDD will fail without some level of enforcement. Programmers do not want to switch style and will not write their first unit test and suddenly see the light.

You can enforce on a management level, but this is time-consuming for all involved. Some level of this is necessary at the beginning anyway, but ultimately you will need automatic enforcement. The answer to this is to introduce Continuous Integration.

I've found that a CI Server is the ultimate keystone to any TDD environment. Unless developers know that something bad will happen if they don't write the tests, you'll always have cowboys who feel it's beneath them.