quality assurance

Unit Testing – The Big Picture

“Unit Testing – The Big Picture” is a super useful for those of us who need a refresher or an overview of what software testing is in general, and how unit testing relates to other types of testing in particular. It covers a bit of history of testing, different approaches, terminology, and more.

Code quality tools in PHP to check and improve your code

“Code quality tools in PHP to check and improve your code” is a list of both some very well known tools and some new kids on the block. The article covers the following:

PHP-CS-Fixer
- Documentation
- Github
PHPCS
- Documentation
- Github
PHPMD
- Documenation
- Official website
PHPStan
- Github
PHPUnit
- Documentation
- Github
PHPLoc
- Github
PHPCPD
- Github
PHPMND
- Documentation
- Github
churn-php
- Github
dePHPend
- Official website
- Github
PhpCodeFixer
- Documentation
- Github
PhpMetrics
- Official website
- Github

PHP Static Analysis

Here are a couple of new tools in addition to previously mentioned PHPStan:

Psalm by Vimeo. The cool thing about this static analyzer is that it supports both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7, unlike PHPStan which requires PHP 7. (Yeah, I know PHP 5.6 has reached the end of its active support a while back, but there are still quite a few projects around using it.) Additionally, Psalm is easy to control via the XML configuration file, much like PHPUnit and PHP CodeSniffer.
Phan. This one is a bit trickier to install, as it requires some PHP extensions that I’ve never heard about (like PHP AST).

Free and Open Source Test Management Software

Quality Assurance is an important part of the software development. There are many tools available that help with a variety of problems in this domain. At work, we have already been using quite a few of them – mostly those that deal with automated testing – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, Nightwatch.js, TravisCI, BitBucket Pipelines, and more.

But the above tools are mostly for software developers. With the expansion of our quality assurance efforts, I am looking at some more tools and this time around, those that are aimed more towards QA engineers and testers. One particular area that I am currently very interested in is the tool for test (and requirements) management.

My experience in this area is very limited. I just know that such tools do exist. Most of them are propitiatory and expensive, and are used by large organizations. We are not a large company. Our needs are simpler. And our budget for this is not great yet.

So, here is what I’m looking for:

A web-based tool to manage test cases, test plans, test runs, and test results.
This tool should support git version control.
This tool should integrate well with GitHub and BitBucket.
This tool should integrate well with TravisCI and BitBucket Pipelines.
This tool should integrate well with Redmine.
This tool should integrate well with HipChat.
This tool must support multiple projects.
This tool must support both manual and automated tests.
Preferably, the tool should be Open Source software.
Preferably, the tool should be free (as in money).
Preferably, the tool should be written in PHP, as that’s what where we have a lot of in-house expertise.

If you know of a tool that matches all or most of the above, please let me know.

Continue reading Free and Open Source Test Management Software

atoum – modern, simple and intuitive PHP unit testing framework

With all the hype around the quality assurance and testing tools for PHP, I wonder how did I miss atoum. Atoum is a modern, simple and intuitive unit testing framework for PHP. From a quick look around, it seems to be a lot simpler than PHPUnit and I definitely need to find some time to give it a go.

Also, here’s a blog post that describes how Automattic moved from PHPUnit to atoum, which makes a lot of sense (you know what I’m talking about if you ever tried to write PHPUnit tests for WordPress projects).