Failing fast

May 19, 2014

Normally, all failures are logged, but tests continue. If you project contains an hour’s worth of tests which are run on every commit by a continuous integration server, you might elect to fail fast: if something goes wrong, don’t continue testing. To do this you might add this code to your base project’s base test, it will raise an exception in case of a failure, stopping the testing process with a failure.

protected function assert($status, $message = '', $group = 'Other', array $caller = NULL) {
  $return = parent::assert($status, $message, $group, $caller);
  if (!$return && (!$status || $status == 'fail')) {
    // fail fast
    throw new Exception('Failing fast: ' . $message);
  }
  return $return;
}