[development] Simpletest: embrace and utilize

[Robert Douglass]

Hi everyone,

in very recent history I was faced with a set of programming problems 
that I was having a seriously difficult time handling. The architecture 
of my upcoming Solr module had gotten away from me, and every effort I 
made to reel it in and bring it under control was leading to dead ends 
and broken code. The way that I finally got out of the mess was by 
installing the Simpletest module and writing test cases for the 
functionality I needed. The act of codifying the expected behavior of 
every unit of the module helped me get over the hump and write code that 
works. Furthermore, the more test cases I produced, the faster the 
development proceeded. Code began to write itself (almost).

So I've now written an article on unit testing and Simpletest: 
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/introduction-unit-testing

I want to thank Moshe, Rok, and all the others who have worked on this 
code for so long, with so little praise. I hope that now the mass of 
Drupal developers will start to wake up to the potential of writing test 
cases and dig in.

http://drupal.org/project/simpletest


-Robert