Tag: quality assurance

PHPUnit Snapshot Assertions – a way to test without writing actual test cases

phpunit-snapshot-assertions – is an interesting addition to the PHPUnit assertions which allows testing against previously created snapshots.  This is particularly useful for testing the outputs of API end-points, format conversion functions, and the like.  Instead of testing the actual functionality, these assertions allow to compare the output of the current test run with the known good output of a previously created snapshot.

This works well for generic text, but even better for widely used formats like JSON and XML, where, in case of a failed assertion, a meaningful difference can be provided.

Here is a blog post providing some more details on philosophy and methodology.

PHPQA all-in-one Analyzer CLI tool

PHPQA all-in-one Analyzer CLI tool.  This project bundles together all the usual PHP quality control tools, and then some.  It simplifies the installation and configuration of the tools and helps developers to push up the quality control bar on their projects.

The tools currently included are:

Preparing for the PHPUnit 6 and PHP 7

If you woke up today and found that most of your PHP projects’ and libraries’ tests break and fail, I have news for you:  you are doing something wrong.  How do I know?  Because I was doing something wrong too…

First of all, let me save you all the extra Googling.  Your tests are failing, because a new major version of PHPUnit has been released – version 6.0.0.  This version drops support for PHP 5 and, using the opportunity of the major version bump, gets rid of a bunch of stuff that was marked obsolete earlier.

But why does it fail, you ask.  Well, because PHPUnit is included in pretty much every composer.json file out there.  And the way it’s included is almost always is this:

"require-dev": {
"phpunit/phpunit": "*",
}

PHPUnit being a part of pretty much every composer.json file, is probably the reason why people want to be much more relaxed with the used version, than with any other component of the system.  That’s usually good.  Until it breaks, much like today with the release of the PHPUnit 6.

How can you fix the problem? Well, the quickest and the easiest solution is to update the composer.json with “^5.0” instead of “*”.  This will prevent PHPUnit from upgrading until you are ready.

While you are doing it, check the other dependencies and make sure that none of them are using the asterisk either.  Because, chances are, the exact same problem will happen later with those too.

The only difficult bit about this whole situation is the correlated drop for the PHP 5 support.  Yes, sure, it has reached its end of life, but there are still a lot of projects and environments that require it, and will require it for a lonweg time.

As you are the master of your code and dependencies, other people are of their own.  So you can’t really control when each of your dependencies will update the requirement for the PHPUnit 6, or any other tool that requires PHP 7.

On the bright side, major releases of PHP don’t happen that often, so this shouldn’t be the frequent problem.

PhpMetrics – a static analysis tool for PHP

PHPMetrics is yet another tool for static analysis of your PHP codebase.  It aims to provide a simpler and easier to understand report, than all those other tools in the PHP ecosystem today.