A solid unit test suite is essential for ongoing development in large projects, especially those with many people involved. Going back and manually testing every individual component of an application after every change is impractical. Your unit tests will help alleviate that by automatically testing your application’s components and alerting you when something is not working the same way it was when you wrote your tests.
The Zend Framework 2 API uses PHPUnit, and so does this tutorial application. A detailed explanation of unit testing is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so we will only provide sample tests for the components in the pages that follow. This tutorial assumes that you already have PHPUnit installed.
After all the services, DAO, and support classes are tested then it’s time for the controller. Generally, this is hard to test and most developers (based on observation) would rather just test it via Selenium or worse, by hand. That can work but it makes testing logic branches difficult and not to mention it’s time-consuming. Plus no active developer would be willing to wait for browser tests to run before checking in code. Luckily the Spring MVC Test project can do full controller testing via unit tests, it was such a success that it’s now in Spring MVC core as of version 4.0.5.