Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

This is an abstract for a chapter from a book on Quality Assurance in PHP Projects.

The Graph component from the eZ Components project provides an easy to use and extensible library for creating graphical charts. In the eZ Components project we aim to develop test-driven, which resulted in two challenges developing this library.

The output generated by a Graph component is an image, which in most cases is binary-encoded data. Expectations are really hard to create by hand, it is only feasible to create functional tests replaying once created data. The actual image is generated by external libraries such as ext/gd. These external libraries may change their exact output at any time, or even between two runs with the same version of the library. Comparisons of the generated images need to respect that and implement special assertions for the given type of binary data.

Testing the created binary data has proven to be prone to errors. Since the actual image generation has been abstracted away, we are able to use of different image creation mechanisms. Thanks to the support for mock objects in PHPUnit, all calls to the driver layer can be checked for correctness without actually generating images.

Kore Nordmann is an active member of the PHP community and works for eZ Systems on the eZ Components.