PHP quality assurance tools

Some of the most important tools for quality assurance in PHP projects are PHP_Depend and PhpUnderControl. In the future Qafoo - passion for software quality will provide support for both. Last week Manuel already blogged about the support we will provide for Zeta Components.

PHP_Depend has been developed by Manuel for quite some time now and provides you with all those well known metrics for PHP source code, like Cyclomatic Complexity for methods / classes. The full list of calculated metrics is quite extensive and some can be found in PHP_Depends online documentation.

Those metrics are, and should be, used to detect defects in PHP projects early and should be supervised constantly. For example the Cyclomatic Complexity metric might point you to overly complex, hard-to-maintain, code sections, which you probably should refactor. And we all know that less complex code tends to be less bug prune.

We at Qafoo will not only provide support for PHP_Depend, but also help you to use it in your projects and adapt the workflows in your development team to make optimal use of the data provided by PHP_Depend.

Additionally there is PhpUnderControl, which was the first major Continuous Integration solution for PHP software. Manuel works together with me on integrating CI in Arbit, using his expertise in this area. Still, there are many projects out there using PhpUnderControl and we are happy to provide you with support for this, too.

For both projects, which are integral parts of the quality lifecycle of PHP applications, we are also available to provide training, consulting and further extend the software to your request. You can get in contact with us by mail at contact@qafoo.com.