Quality Assurance on PHP projects - Introduction

Quality Assurance has become an increasing important part of web application development, especially with PHP applications. When I look back in history it was common people just deployed web apps and tested it with a browser on the production server. We all know this process couldn't cover all possible user interactions and many bugs were reported back by end users the days after the deployment of a new release.

Luckily there are a lot of tools available that allows you to increase quality of these web applications, and the best part is they are all based on PHP! Let's have a quick look at what tools are interesting to start improving quality assurance on your PHP projects.

These series will cover most of the tools that will allow you to ensure your PHP projects will have an increased quality and your developers become more confident in their work.

If you want to know more about increased quality and better code, I can recommend reading the PHP QA Book, written by Stefan Priebsch and Sebastian Bergmann. It's official title is "Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications" published by Wrox Press (ISBN 978-0-470-87249-9).

In these series I do want to dig a little deeper in tools you might have heard of or concepts you agree are important, but are too high-level to comprehend. I also would like to open up a discussion to see if these tools are giving you the expected results or not.