The third step: The actual plugin development

Regarding the process of the actual development, our developer André says the following:
To make sure everything works well, the extension is tested during development, of course. Once André is satisfied, some final tests round up the process. “For many plugins, automatic software tests are created. These are costly, but make later changes more secure. Sometimes browser tests are also performed. Here, a browser instance is fed with operations that simulate a user’s operation.”
Software testing can be tedious and repetitive, but it is in fact one of André’s favorite tasks. “It gives me the confidence that we won’t trigger side effects in future updates. I like to make sure that a newly gained feature doesn’t interfere with existing features,” he says.
“I first look to see if the platform already offers software development kits that make my work easier. This increases the effort in the beginning, but it always pays off in the long run. I also always make an effort to avoid duplicate code. Just the other day, I needed our shared inbound numbers in multiple projects. Instead of hard-coding these into the code master, I published it as a central package. When our numbers change, all I have to do is change the parent package and follow up with the versions in the child packages. You could say that this results in a ‘single point of truth’.”