In this episode, we dive into writing tests to make sure our service slot generator is working as it should. Rather than starting with test-driven development, we're taking a step back and covering our existing code with some high-level feature tests—think of these as "does the whole thing work as expected?" checks.
We kick things off with the basics: testing that available time slots actually show up for a service on a given day. We show you how to set up the test date (so your tests don't depend on the current time and accidentally break in the future!) and how to create the employees and services you need in the database. Once that's set up, we verify that the right number of slots appear for the day we care about.
Next, we make things a bit more interesting by checking if multiple days return the correct slots — for example, making sure that if we look at more than one day, we get all the slots for each day. We keep building on this, eventually looking at scenarios where some slots should be excluded, like when there's already an appointment booked, or if an appointment is cancelled (which should make those slots available again).
We also work through mapping and flattening the slot collection to make it really easy to assert that certain times are or aren't available, showing you some handy tricks for working with date collections.
Finally, we look at more complex situations, such as checking availability for multiple employees at once. By the end, we've built out a nice set of feature tests that keep our slot generator trustworthy and easy to refactor in the future, as well as showing you some techniques and patterns for your own testing in Laravel. If you want even more thoroughness, you can definitely dig into lower-level unit tests, but this episode gets us a really solid safety net!