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Testing

This page is the top level page regarding all testing activities around the Moodle project. Testing is essential to make sure that developed code does what it is meant to do, without causing new problems.

Manual testing​

Code testing​

Code is tested as part of reviewing at some key parts of the Moodle development process.

  • Development. The developer of some code should test their own work on a wide variety of environments for correctness and performance
  • Peer review. Developers often test each others work early in the development process
  • Integration review. The integration team tests code weekly while they are evaluating suitability for integration into Moodle.
More info

We recommend that you follow the Testing instructions guide to help you write clear manual testing instructions.

Integration functional testing​

Moodle has a dedicated team of testers who perform most of the manual testing for integration issues. Developers submitting patches should always cover the patch with unit tests and/or Behat behavioural tests.

More info

We recommend that you follow the Testing of integrated issues guide to get a better understanding of how testing integrated issues works.

QA testing​

Once all major features for a new Moodle release have landed, Moodle performs a Quality Assurance test cycle. This test cycle is typically performed by volunteers from the Moodle community who systematically test each available feature to ensure that it still works as intended. This process typically lasts 4-6 weeks and happens once per Major release.

More info

We recommend that you follow the QA testing guide to know more about the Quality Assurance test cycle.

For major theme changes, additional manual tests may be run.

Automated testing​

Unit tests​

PHPUnit tests are supported as part of the code from Moodle 2.3 onwards. These are automated tests of very low-level code functionality that a developer should write as part of any new code.

More info

We recommend that you follow PHPUnit integration to help you run and write unit tests.

Acceptance tests​

Moodle uses a framework called Behat to automatically test the user-interface. Tests can be written for each plugin, and for Moodle core.

tip

Because Behat tests work through the Moodle user interface, they are a bit slow. Therefore, you should probably also use PHPUnit to test the detailed edge cases in your code.

Continuous integration testing​

As soon as code is added to the integration repository, the continuous integration server tests the new code for:

  • Coding guidelines
  • PHPUnit tests
  • SimpleTest unit tests on older versions of Moodle
  • Detect unresolved merge conflicts
  • Compare databases upgraded from previous versions
  • Check the version.php is correct

A failure here notifies the integrators that the build has failed.

Regression testing​

Every day, an automated build in a test server runs a large number of tests concerning key functions of Moodle, to make sure that everything still works and that some new fix in Moodle hasn't caused problems elsewhere.

These tests must pass completely before a new release can be made.

note

Moodle uses a sponsored version of BrowserStack for testing on multiple browsers.