continuous integration

1. Have a continuous integration solution in place. Really. If you don’t, you just burn money by writing tests.
   
   I would go so far and say, if you don’t have continuous integration, you should stop writing unit tests and do click testing.
2. The definition of “tests pass” is “tests pass on the continous integration system”.
   
   “Works for me” has neither a place in the bugtracker nor everywhere else.
3. If you can’t test it, the architecture is most likely wrong (exceptions are sessions and caching related code which is generally hard to test).
   

phpUnderControl: A Quick Start to Continuous Integration

Manuel Pichler points out that the latest version of phpUnderControl (an add-on for CruiseControl, a continuous integration tool) has been released - 0.4.3.

The Zend Developer Zone has reminder posted about some of the upcoming webinars brought to you from Zend on a wide range of topics:

Brian DeShong has posted some of his "food for thought" on the development process that's behind the scenes of different PHP applications.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects.

I’ve got some decent experience writing unit tests with PHPUnit, using a smoke testing script, and even writing use cases (it’s been a while, though).

I will present both a tutorial and a regular session at year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo:

Michael Kimsal has put together a small page to help you get started using the phpUnderControl continuous integration system:

I’ve put together a small page with some notes which have helped me during my recent set up of phpUnderControl.  I will probably add more to the list in the coming weeks, but these are a couple stumbling blocks I hit the past few days.  If you’re not using phpUnderControl, you owe it to yourself to check it out, as I think ‘continuous integration’ will likely change the way you think of development.  I’ve used CruiseControl in the past for PHP, but the PHP-specifics phpU

I’ve been taking on a lot of small projects lately, and have been noticing the same problems over and over.  I’ve seen these for years, but I’ve dealt with far more projects in a short time than I ever did in the past.

The checklist below wouldn’t necessarily determine if I’d take a project or not, but would likely influence the rate and schedule.