How Can Laravel's Built-In Testing Framework Help Businesses Ensure Their Web Application Quality?

In recent years, Laravel, a PHP framework has gained immense popularity due to its ability to create web applications that are not only functional but also pleasant for developers to work with. This framework follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and is built on top of Symfony, another popular web application framework in the PHP world.

Laravel was created by Taylor Otwell in 2010 and since then the open-source community have ensured that all the essential features to build a web application are included in the framework. As a result, Laravel continues to dominate the PHP market segment, with a 17% increase in usage in 2021 compared to the previous year, according to a recent survey by JetBrains. Furthermore, Laravel's robust built-in testing frameworks can help businesses ensure the quality of their web applications.


Benefits of Laravel Testing For Your Business 

In the world of software development, testing is a crucial step toward ensuring that your product is free of bugs and satisfies all technical as well as user requirements while delivering optimal performance. By undergoing testing, you can catch problems early on and save money on costly fixes down the line.

Testing also inspires confidence and satisfaction among your customers, who appreciate the value of a glitch-free product. Furthermore, testing can help improve your software's security making sure that your customer's data is safe from prying eyes. It helps improve your product's overall quality, which is vital for attracting and retaining customers.

If you're looking to test your software and ensure that it meets all quality standards, then Laravel's built-in testing framework is a great place to start. With Laravel for web development, you can test your software at every stage of development, ensuring that it's bug-free, secure and effective.


Types of Laravel testing

When it comes to testing a Laravel mobile application, there are many types of tests. However, most types are defined by the scope of the code the programmers test. Additionally, the ideal type of test for your application is the one that best suits your project and business needs. Let us walk you through the various types of testing in Laravel.


Unit testing

Unit testing is one of the essential types of Laravel testing. Moreover, PHPUnit is the go-to tool for creating and executing unit tests for Laravel apps. The objective is to test specific functions thoroughly to ensure their correct behavior across various scenarios.

Unit testing involves defining variables, creating objects, and injecting mocks before calling the function under test. Finally, the expected results are compared with the actual output. It's vital to ensure that each test is self-contained and independent of others, and their order of execution doesn't matter. These practices are particularly essential for businesses relying on Laravel apps to ensure reliability and stability.


Integration testing

Integration tests play an ideal role in testing the interaction between different components, such as forms, APIs, or third-party systems. Unlike unit tests that focus on individual code segments, integration tests evaluate how these components work in sync to achieve the desired functionality.

Integration tests are much similar to feature tests but the difference is that they also consider external interfaces, data repositories and applications. They do not rely on mocks and instead examine the behavior of the system as a whole. For example, while individual components of a vehicle might function properly, integration testing ensures that they work seamlessly together as an integrated vehicle.


Feature testing

Feature testing is a testing process that ensures an application's feature works as expected. This type of testing is broader than unit testing, as it evaluates multiple methods calls to verify that the complete feature operates correctly. When dealing with third-party system calls or external dependencies, feature testing can mock those dependencies. This is when integration testing comes into play.

Developing a feature test code is more challenging than unit tests because of the need to test multiple methods related to a single feature in a Laravel application. PHPUnit, a unit testing framework, can be used to develop a feature test. Businesses must prioritize feature testing to ensure their Laravel applications function as intended.


Acceptance testing

Unit, feature, and integration tests ensure that a developer's requirements are met, but acceptance tests ensure that the implemented application specifications meet the end-user requirements. Passing all the tests in the build pipeline may not guarantee that the solution will meet the end user's needs. Therefore, end-to-end acceptance tests are necessary.

While PHPUnit is out-of-the-box tooling with Laravel, it may not provide all the utilities needed to develop end-to-end acceptance tests. Laravel Dusk and the Codeception framework are two popular frameworks for developing end-to-end acceptance tests for Laravel web applications.

Laravel Dusk is best for browser automation testing, where you can open a webpage, perform automated repetitive tasks, crawl sites and scrape information right from the pages. On the contrary, Codeception provides a simple and readable interface for business users to interact with Laravel web applications on a high level, including browser testing using popular browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari or the cloud testing platform combined with Selenium WebDriver. Additionally, it allows for the emulation of browsers using HTTP requests fired through cURL in combination with PHPBrowser.


Responsive testing

Designing a responsive web application is important for optimal rendering on any smart device including smartphones, laptops, tablets or desktops. However, implementing an automated responsive testing strategy for Laravel-based web applications can be challenging.

However, the LT Browser is a mobile-friendly tester that simplifies responsive testing by providing 50+ pre-installed viewports and allowing for precise viewport control, layout transition point targeting, layout-oriented assertions, and visual verification.  It's an excellent tool for businesses to ensure their Laravel applications are responsive and error-free.


End-to-end testing

End-to-end testing is crucial for testing website flows as end-users would experience them. Laravel Dusk and Selenium-based frameworks are popular options for end-to-end testing. Whereas, testRigor on the other hand, is a powerful declarative tool for end-to-end testing that supports web and mobile browser testing and email validation and manipulation. It is less suitable for unit or integration testing but excels at end-to-end testing.


Real-time testing

Live testing is the type of testing of your Laravel application in an ad-hoc manner. However, more than carrying out manual testing, a standalone browser installed on a local machine can be required since users might access your application on different operating systems and browsers.

To address this issue, businesses can opt for real-time browser testing offered by the LambdaTest platform. This provides infrastructure for manual testing cost-effectively. Using Laravel for real-time browser testing as it is an excellent choice for businesses looking to manually test their Laravel web application.


Winding up

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax and diverse testing methods. Hire remote Laravel developers as they attempt to take the pain out of development by easing all common and mundane tasks used in most web projects. Conclusively, testing is the most crucial part of your app development project as you won™t know how good your product is until you test it. Thus, it is a great way of knowing that you™ll be providing the best possible version of your application before it hits the market.

Author

reverbtime-magazine

Poland Web Designer (Wispaz Technologies) is a leading technology solutions provider dedicated to creating innovative applications that address the needs of corporate businesses and individuals.

Let’s Design Your New Website

Do you want to have a website that attracts attention and wows visitors? Then, we are prepared to assist! Contact us by clicking the button below to share your thoughts with us.