The last year saw quite some activity in the area of automated tests for Joomla.

During the development of Joomla 4.0, several different paths were tested for the (pardon the pun) testing and in 2019 the best solutions were selected.

For the development-branch of Joomla 4.0, the following changes were made:

We consolidated the different CI systems which we used on mainly Drone CI and migrated our outdated Drone CI installation to the latest versions and on a more professional setup with multiple servers. Now with new features available, we greatly extended the number of test-steps we are running. PHP Unittests were extended to run on all supported PHP and MySQL versions and integration tests were introduced. Those integration tests also are now run on both MySQL and PostgreSQL. Likewise system tests are now being run on all of these database systems.

The codestyle of the project was updated to the latest version of our used codestyle, as well as the testing tools. Tests for the webservice API were added and a newer and faster version of the security scanner RIPS installed. Even more importantly however, we improved the tests and reduced the number of false errors to a much lower level. With all these changes, the automated tests are now a rather stable support for higher quality in development, even though we still need to greatly improve the testcoverage. A good goal for 2020.

Besides the changes to the development-branch of 4.0, we also created and documented several supporting tools for our tests. This includes a large number of docker images for use in tests. The biggest change however was that the ATT took over the responsibility for the Patchtester component. This component was then also extended to support better testing for Joomla 4.0 just in time for the worldwide PBF.

2019 improved the automated tests greatly and created a good foundation for further extension in 2020. We are looking forward to your participation in this.