Laravel testing: DDD, feature tests, and long-term maintainability
How we use feature and unit tests with a clear domain layer in Laravel to ship confidently and keep the codebase maintainable.
In production Laravel apps, tests are most valuable when they reflect real behaviour and stay fast. We leaned on feature tests for critical flows and unit tests for domain logic, with a thin controller layer that delegates to services.
We avoided testing implementation details: instead of mocking every dependency, we used Laravel’s testing database and real service classes where it was cheap enough. That kept refactors from breaking tests for the wrong reasons.
Structuring the app with clear boundaries (controllers, application services, domain) made it obvious what to test at each level. The result was a test suite that caught regressions without slowing down day-to-day development.