Preparing PHP TestFest 2009 with PHP Peru

Thanks to an interesting article by Zoe Slattery (who works at IBM UK but is well known in the PHP Community for her work on the QA Team) in PHP Architect, I got into an attempt (at least) at preparing a participation to the PHP TestFest 2009. This article is an attempt at explaining briefly the steps undertaken. Basically, the objective is to organize it in parallel to my work in Dokeos, taking all the benefits from training myself on the unit testing methodology (I already have very basic PHPUnit and SimpleTest knowledge, but PHP tests seem to use another system). It is also a good activity to be doing during a PHP meeting, because every PHP developer should know, really, what a unit test is *and* how to make one. Tests writing is easy. The only problem is it takes time and a patient mind to write them, carefully ensuring that all the code is covered. The TestFest is taking place between April and June of 2009. The good thing is that you get some help from the QA team setting up the event. The first interesting source is the TestFest page on the PHP's QA site. This one contains all the important links. The second best link is certainly the page reporting the current PHP revision's coverage by unit tests. It allows you to see where your help is needed. For example, having a look at it, I would probably be going for test cases for the DOM extension or the CURL extension, whichever is easier to start with. I'll then be reporting my group on http://wiki.php.net/qa/testfest and finally I'll start reading the documentation on how to write PHP tests The schedule for the PHP event is already on our events page I've already downloaded PHP 5.3 RC1 from the QA front page and analysed, as suggested in the article, the ext/dom/tests/DOMDocument_loadHTML_basic.phpt which contains a very simple example test case. Now I'm about to have a look at the phpt details page.