Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

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

When OXID eSales AG decided in early 2008 to release its then 5 years old ecommerce system as Open Source, they knew that this was only possible due to the fact it was refactored and its higher code quality assured by unit testing.

Only a refactored system with unit tests in continuous integration environment would allow for the needed shorter release cycles and attract new developers. The whole development team was new to refactoring as well as agile development methodologies. It faced the challenge of introducing eXtreme Programming and Continuous Integration techniques and tools such as PHPUnit, CruiseControl, and Selenium.

After finishing a refactoring project that was supposed to last 3 months but actually took much longer, OXID eSales AG had completely changed its development processes and published its software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in October 2008.

This case study will show the lessons learned during this transition at OXID eSales AG: what worked and what pitfalls other development teams can expect during a similar transition.

Erik Kort is the Head of Technical Development at OXID eSales AG.