Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

The English Edition of the PHP Quality Assurance book started shipping. Stefan and I, as well as all our contributing authors, are very happy about this. Below you can find additional information about the book.

PHP has risen to become one of the most popular programming languages in the world, making high-quality, sustainable applications and frameworks created in PHP more sought after than ever. Using real-world case studies from well-known companies, this valuable book presents the planning, execution, and automation of tests for the different layers and tiers of a web software architecture and explains how these companies measure and test the quality of their software.

• Looks at the characteristics of good internal and external software quality
• Shares techniques for writing new code, changing and optimizing existing code, and finding and fixing bugs
• Reveals bad testing practices so you know what to avoid
• Addresses how to test service-oriented APIs, a WebDAV server, and many PHP frameworks
• Reviews large-scale Selenium-based testing and testing database interaction

With this book, you will learn to develop high-quality PHP frameworks and applications that can easily be maintained with reasonable cost and effort.

Almost a year has passed since we finished the manuscript for the German edition of the book -- and almost half a year since the German edition started shipping. High time for another status update.

The video below shows a visualization of activity in the book's Git repository since April 2010. During this timeframe we mostly worked on translating chapters from English to German and editing the chapters for the German edition followed by translating chapters from German to English and editing the English edition's chapters.



As you can see from the video, the work on the English edition is now complete and the Git repository is quiet. The English edition is scheduled to ship on May 10, 2011 under the title "Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications".

The German Edition of the PHP Quality Assurance book started shipping. Stefan and I, as well as all our contributing authors, are very happy about this. Below you can find additional information about the book in German.

Wenn die Hütte brennt, werden Überstunden gemacht und Urlaube abgesagt. Trotzdem werden Termine und Qualitätsziele meist verfehlt. Da Software jedoch weit länger lebt als ursprünglich geplant, gehen die Probleme erst dann richtig los, wenn später Änderungen und Erweiterungen notwendig werden.

Im vorliegenden Buch vermitteln Sebastian Bergmann und Stefan Priebsch gemeinsam mit ihren Co-Autoren umfassendes Fachwissen und Erfahrungen zur Qualitätssicherung in PHP-Projekten. Zahlreiche Fallstudien veranschaulichen die Planung, Durchführung und Automation von Tests für die unterschiedlichen Softwareschichten sowie die Beurteilung von Softwarequalität mit Hilfe von Softwaremetriken. Sie sind die Grundlage dafür, Entwicklungsprozesse durch den Einsatz geeigneter Methoden wie etwa Continuous Integration zu optimieren. Die Fallstudien zeigen, wie bekannte Firmen und Projekte die Qualität ihrer Software messen, kontrollieren und sichern, ermöglichen einen Blick hinter die Kulissen und vermitteln so wertvolle Praxiserfahrungen.

Das Buch empfiehlt sich allen, die eine Referenz für die Entwicklung qualitativ hochwertiger und nachhaltiger Softwareanwendungen in PHP suchen.

Das Standardwerk zur Qualitätssicherung

• Liefert wichtiges Grundlagenwissen zum Testen PHP-basierter Software


• Zeigt die Umsetzung von Maßnahmen zur Qualitätssicherung in der Praxis


• Enthält hochinformative Fallstudien bekannter Firmen und Projekte


• Aus der Feder anerkannter PHP-Experten


• Beschreibt den aktuellen Wissensstand in Sachen Software-Qualitätssicherung

The English edition of the book is scheduled for publication in December -- stay tuned!

We are almost done with the manuscript for the German edition (preorder at Amazon.de) of the book. In a couple of days we can focus on getting the manuscript for the English edition (preorder at Amazon.com) ready for the publisher.

It has been quiet on this website since we posted the last contributed chapter abstract in June and it is time to give you an update. But first, allow me to refresh your memory on the list of contributed chapters:

• Best Practices
  • TYPO3: The Agile Future of a Ponderous Project
  • Unit Testing Bad Practices by Example
  • Quality Assurance at Digg
• Servers and Services
  • Testing Service Oriented APIs
  • Testing a WebDAV Server
  • Testing Database Interaction
• Architecture
  • Testing Symfony and Symfony Applications
  • Testing the ezcGraph Component
• QA in the Large
  • Large-Scale Selenium-Based Testing at studiVZ
  • Continuous Integration with phpUnderControl
  • swoodoo: A True Agile Story
• Non-Functional Aspects
  • Performance
  • Usability
  • Security

As we only have a deadline for the German edition so far and since we received the majority of contributed chapters in English, Stefan and I are currently busy translating the contributed chapters from English to German in an effort to meet our deadline. We are currently looking at a release date for the German edition in late spring / early summer of 2010.

Once we have finished the manuscript for the German edition, we will start working on the manuscript for the English edition. Hopefully, this process will be much faster as we only need to translate a couple of chapters from German to English. We are hopeful that the English edition will be available not much later than the German edition.

Stefan Priebsch and myself, Sebastian Bergmann, are writing a book on "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects". The book will be published in English and German at the same time later this year.

The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and I write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book.

The case study authors will not always agree with each other. In fact, we invite different opinions on how problems are solved to give the readers not "one single truth" but provide different approaches to problems and views on issues.

Our motivation to write this book is simple: there is no such book on the market and from our experience a book such as this is needed. We get questions from our clients all the time: which book can I get for my developers or recommend to potential job applicants as required reading for the topic of web application quality assurance? This book will be the answer to these questions.

The list of case study authors includes contributors to well-known Open Source projects from the PHP community as well as developers working on some of the largest websites built using PHP, which happen to be some of the Web's most popular sites. Other contributing authors write about practices and tools.

Over the course of the next weeks, we will introduce each case study author together with the case study he or she is contributing to the book.