Talk on software quality with phpUnderControl

Update: More details on the place, and THANKS to Peytz & co. for hosting.

The dog ate my fine blog post about the PHP Meetup this past Thursday. So I reconstruct this from memory.

The past Thursday, there was a PHP Meetup Copenhagen, and I talked about phpUnderControl, a continuous integration server for PHP. Basically, it’s an ambitious patch for CruiseControl, a big old Java project. The folks that hosted the thing were Peytz & Co, a web app company, who creates little services, like user surveys and such. Their facilities were awesome, and we got fine pizza and even a pilsner. Large, mess hall-like room with two huge tables. It was out in the sticks, though (Nordvest is far off for a Nørrebro guy; or is it, folks?), so I had to get on a bus to get there.

During the talk, I asked the attendees about their testing/coverage situation. Turns out we all have lots of room for improvement, so most of my talk was not about “how to install” phpUnderControl, nor any other tool (this info is readily available online), but on practical tips on getting coverage. How to start, when your legacy is huge. How to use the numbers and other metrics from PHPUnit. I showed Michael Feathers‘ book about testing & legacy code.

I met with David T, with whom I had only talked online before. He once sent me an email out of the blue: “I am moving to Copenhagen, I also hack the web, I’m also Swedish”, and we’ve kept track of each other since. But Thursday was the first time I met him.

Bonus detail, on blog only: Manuel, author of phpUnderControl, told me to also point to PHP_Depend, his new metrics tool that wants to visualize the dependencies among the packages involved in your application. Package? Yes, PHP has no package scope, nor anything near it, so PHP_Depend parses the @package marker in a documentation block.

I am working on making the slides into a useful online read, as a PDF you can spacebar through.