CSI: PHP

"Looking at your tweets I cannot even fathom what your job is. CSI:PHP?" — @grmpyprogrammer

Interview Coding Disasters -- FizzBuzz (+ TDD) Edition

| Comments

Today’s anonymous submitter is shocked to discover that FizzBuzz really works (and TDD isn’t as alive and well as he’d hoped).

A local company asked me for assistance recruiting a new PHP developer. I helped them come up with a job description, a few interview questions, and I threw in the FizzBuzz test for good measure. Since they’re working on implementing Test Driven Development, I added “ … bonus points for writing FizzBuzz using TDD.” I was horrified to see the massive fail that were the FizzBuzz submissions, but the single TDD submission took the cake.

Interestingly, it looks like the FizzBuzz portion of the submission probably works. It would have been a good idea if the submitter had read something, anything, about TDD before trying his hand at it in an interview situation.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77

<?php

class FizzBuzzTest {
    //build array that contains inputs 1-100
    public function totalInput() {

        $results = array();

        for( $i=1; $i<=100; $i++ ) {
            $results[] = $i;
        }

        return $results;
    }

    //build array that controls ttd test inputs 1-15
    public function tddInput() {

        $results = array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15);

        return $results;
    }

    //compare tddInput with the expected results
    public function testInput($source) {

        if($source == 'short') {
            $input = array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15);
        } else if($source == 'long') {
            $input = $this->totalInput();
        }

        $test = new runTest();

        $expected = array(1,2,'Fizz',4,'Buzz','Fizz',7,8,'Fizz','Buzz',11,'Fizz',13,14,'FizzBuzz');

        $testResults = $test->process($input);

        if($source == 'long') {
            return $testResults;
        } else {
            $this->assertEquals($expected, $testResults);
        }
    }
}

//replace multiples of 3 with FIZZ
//replace multiples of 5 with BUZZ
//replace multiples of 3 & 5 with FIZZBUZZ
//if none apply, show number
class runTest {
    public function process($input) {

        $results = array();

        foreach($input as $value) {

            $output = '';

            if($value % 3 == 0 && $value % 5 == 0) {
                $output = 'FizzBuzz';
            } elseif($value % 3 == 0) {
                $output = 'Fizz';
            } elseif($value % 5 == 0) {
                $output = 'Buzz';
            } else {
                $output = $value;
            }

            $results[] = $output;
        }

        return $results;
    }
}

?>

Comments