Tag: quality assurance

Reading postmortems

Once in a while a seemingly straightforward article turns into a goldmine of links and resources. This happened to me today with this one – “Reading postmortems“.

Not only this article itself is a very nice roundup of common sources for system failures, but it also links to a couple of awesome references:

  • Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. This is both a talk and a paper.
  • danluu/post-mortems – a GitHub repository with a collection of publicly available postmortems from a variety of organizations, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, NASA, GitHub, and more.

If you still have no idea what postmortem is, Wikipedia explains.

GrumPHP – PHP quality control tool

GrumPHP is yet another quality control tool for PHP. But unlike a million other – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, and the like – this one is more of a tying knot. GrumPHP integrates via git hooks. It runs one more of the other tools, making sure that the changes you are committing are up to the par.

The support for other tools is excellent. You’ll find anything from the basic unit tests and coding style checks to commit message formatting and content, Robo tasks, and even custom shell scripts.

PhpMetrics – static analysis tool for PHP


PhpMetrics is yet another tool in the ever growing list of the static code analyzers for PHP.  Compared to the rest, I think this one is the easiest to install and run.  And it produces the most eye candy reports ever.  The generated report is in the HTML format, with fancy charts and graphs, and makes it really easy to spot and fix the issues.




composer-plugin-qa – Composer Plugin for PHP Quality Assurance Tools


composer-plugin-qa is a Composer plugin which adds all the most popular PHP quality assurance tools as composer scripts, so that you don’t have to install and set them up one by one.  The list of tools includes the following:

  • PHPUnit: Testing Framework
  • PHPCOV: CLI frontend for the PHP_CodeCoverage
  • Paratest: Parallel testing for PHPUnit
  • DbUnit: Puts your database into a known state between test runs
  • PHPLOC: A tool for quickly measuring the size of a PHP project
  • PHPCPD: Copy/Paste Detector
  • PHP_Depend: Quality of your design in the terms of extensibility, reusability and maintainability
  • PHPMD: User friendly frontend application for the raw metrics stream measured by PHP Depend
  • PhpMetrics: Static analysis tool, gives metrics about PHP project and classes
  • PHP_CodeSniffer: Detects violations of a defined set of coding standards
  • PHP-CS-Fixer: A tool to automatically fix coding standards issues
  • Security-Checker: Checks if your application uses dependencies with known security vulnerabilities

This list is very similar to the one in my other recent post.




Mailtrap – safe email testing for development teams


Mailtrap is a handy service for any developer or team that needs to test outgoing emails from test and staging environments, without spamming real users.  It’s basically a fake SMTP server with some controls of where and how to forward messages, and ways of analyzing, sharing, and testing of HTML rendering.