5/5/2023 0 Comments Pester test examplesYou may consider writing applications instead.) It’s not as good for scripts, largely because it’s super hard to think about and write PowerShell scripts as “units.” (It makes for awkward, difficult-to-maintain code that most PowerShell engineers can’t maintain. Pester is most appropriate for testing PowerShell functions, which act as units that can be tested. My favorite analogy is checking the date on the milk before you put it in your coffee: if the milk is expired, you’ll never put it into your drink. Unit testing is a type of functional testing (‘does the software do what it’s supposed to do?’) and means testing a software “unit” (a single change) in isolation, before attempting to integrate it into the larger whole. Pester is best for unit testing and is a free and open-source project designed for testing PowerShell, written in PowerShell. PSScriptAnalyzer is free and reduces the risk of finding errors later in the testing process, but it is NOT a replacement for testing. It’s most appropriate for PowerShell scripts and functions, and the VSCode PowerShell extension underlines problems with green squiggles. Running a set of rules based on PowerShell best practices (both from PowerShell officially and from the user community), the checker “generates DiagnosticResults (errors and warnings) to inform users about potential code defects.” It’s very much like the spellchecker in Microsoft Word, putting colored squiggles underneath anything with an issue. PSScriptAnalyzer is good for static analysis for PowerShell scripts and modules. The three most popular PowerShell testing tools seem to be PSScriptAnalyzer, Pester, and WhatIf. To save you research time, this article will share a bit about these three popular tools before we tell you the secret to PowerShell testing for “leveled-up” teams Popular Tools The tools might not be the best choice for teams embracing all skill levels the better way to treat PowerShell testing is using a software development lifecycle (SDLC). Teams embracing the multiple levels of PowerShell XP need those at multiple XP levels to be able to participate in PowerShell testing. Like a video game, you’ll have some players at just 1XP (they can open the literal PowerShell and paste something into it) while others are 50,000XP superstars (they can use C# to write, test, and build cmdlets that are packages in modules). In an earlier article, we explained that you can level up your Ops team much faster by embracing different levels of PowerShell experience instead of relying on your team’s PowerShell expert. These are great tools… if you have the PowerShell experience points (XP) to understand how to use them. Googling around has probably yielded the same three tools over and over: Unless you’re the reincarnation of some famous daredevil, you know better than to put anything into Production without testing.
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