Functional tests, and speeding up the schema creation
When Symfony2 was created I first learned about the functional test, which is an interesting type of test where everything about your application is as real as possible. Just like with an integration or end-to-end test. One big difference: the test runner exercises the application's front controller programmatically, instead of through a web server. This means that the input for the test is a Request object, not an actual HTTP message.