Tests

Tests help you to ensure that the behavior of your application does not break while restructuring the code. But in many cases you will want to apply techniques of refactoring just to make your code more testable and to come to a stage where writing unit tests gets cheap. There the dog seems to chase its own tail.

We found out that high-level functional tests can deal as a good basis to get started with refactoring. Even very old legacy applications can usually be tested through the browser using Mink with PHPUnit (or Mink with Behat). Which of both solutions you choose depends on your project team: If you are familiar with PHPUnit and don't plan of involving non-technical people in testing later, PHPUnit + Mink is a solid choice for you.

Before you start writing tests you need to setup at least a rudimentary automation system that can reset your development installation (most likely the database). The goal must not be to get a fully fledged infrastructure automation (which is of course still desirable) but to get a predictable, reproducible starting state for your tests. Maybe you just hack up a shell script or use PHPUnits setupBeforeClass() to apply a big bunch of SQL.

Then you start writing tests through the front-end for the parts of your code that you want to touch first, e.g. a really bad controller action (which code to refactor first will be part of another article).

Make sure to concentrate on the essentials: Keep the current behavior working. Don't care too much about good test code. You can throw these tests away after you finished your refactoring or just keep a few of them and clean them up later. As usual this is a matter of trade-off. What you want to achieve here is an automated version of the click-and-play tests you'd do manually in the browser to verify things still work.

Code coverage can be of good help here to see if you have already enough tests to be safe. We have a blog post on using code coverage with Behat for exactly this purpose. The same technique can be applied to running PHPUnit with Mink. But beware: the goal is not $someHighPercent code coverage! The goal is to give you a good feeling for working with the underlying code. Once you have reached that state, stop writing tests and focus on the actual refactoring again.

Baby Steps

When you start with restructuring your code, do yourself a favor and don't be too ambitious. The smaller your steps are, the easier it gets. Ideally, you will only apply a single refactoring step (e.g. extract method or even rename variable) at once, then run your tests and commit.

We know that this is hard to get through in the first place, especially when you did not do much refactoring before. But reminding yourself over and over again to go very small steps into a better direction is really helpful for multiple reasons:

1. It reduces the risk of breaking something. The human brain can only cope with a limited amount of complexity. The larger the change is, the more things you need to keep in mind. This raises the chance of messing things up and waist time.

2. If you messed up the current step (for example by changing behavior or realizing that your change did not lead to a good result) large changes make it harder for you to just reset and restart. You will think about the time you already invested and will probably go on trying to fix the state. However, this typically makes it worse. Reset to HEAD and restart the refactoring step should be the way to go instead.

3. While you might have a big picture in mind where your refactoring should lead, this might not be the best goal. Maybe there are better solutions you did not think about in the first place. Doing baby steps will keep the door open for correcting your path at any time.

4. Chances that you will get through a large refactoring without being disturbed are low. There is always an emergency fix to be applied, a very important meeting to be joined, good coffee to be drunken or just Facebook that will require you to stop. Getting back into your working stack later will be hard and committing a non-working state should be a no-go. With baby steps, you can just cancel the current step or finish it within seconds and leave safely.

Long story short: Do yourself the favor and get used to baby steps. This will sometimes even result in more ugly intermediate steps. Get over it, things will eventually be better!

As a side note: People often ask us, if committing each and every baby step won't lead to polluting your version history. If you feel that way, rather go for squashing your commits later than doing larger steps with each commit.

What are your tips for successful refactoring? Leave us a comment!

The current issue of the German PHP Magazin also has a slightly more extensive article on this topic by us.