Have you ever been faced with a list of complex pricing requirements for an e-commerce store? A multi-step process that has many different pathways? Some interactive elements requiring JavaScript? A template or block that should look or work slightly differently depending on the combination of options or data it receives? Has the solution to any of these ever felt inherently fragile, required extensive manual re-testing every time you make a change, or resulted in a panicked phone call or email from a client because your change impacted some other part of the site that you didn’t even think of?

Sounds like you could do with a way to reduce the risk of human error by having something to automatically check all those pesky edge cases, combinations of options, types and amounts of data, etc., for you! Whether it’s during initial development as you build up layers of complexity and want to make sure you haven’t broken the earlier layers, or when you come back to the project in a year’s time praying this change to the layout doesn’t inadvertently break some usage buried deep in the blog archives – writing and using automated tests can reduce the risks and increase your confidence when writing or modifying complex code.

In this talk, you’ll hear about some of the principles, methodologies, and types of automated testing relevant to developing WordPress themes and plugins, some of the tools available, and see some real-world examples of how they can be used.