Continuous Integration in PHP

Why, what and how?

Wilco Jansen

October 4th 2009

Tdose, at the Fontys University of

Applied Science in Eindhoven, Netherlands
 Wilco Jansen

Formerly Involved in Joomla

• Board member Open Source matters
• Core team member
• (first ever) Development coordinator
• Creator of the Joomla bug-squad
• Google Summer of Code program
manager 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions
• Google Highly Open participation content program manager in
2008
This presentation is about development tools
Continuous integration in PHP
That help build better software in PHP
Things to think about before you run out of time...
Tools will solve some problems
 Why use continuous integration?

● The earliest possible detection of problems in the software

● Detection of integration problems, no last minute hiatus
before releases
● Early warning of broken/incompatible code
● Early warning of conflicting changes
● Immediate unit testing of all changes
● Constant availability of a “current” build for testing, demo
or release purposes
● The immediate impact of checking in incomplete or broken
code acts as an incentive to developers to learn to work
more incrementally with shorter feedback cycles
Why use continuous integration?
The classic approach
 The classic approach

● Write a test program (or be the tester)

● Run the test program (or perform the test
yourself)
● Manually verify the output
● Delete the test program
A fundamental shift
Continuous integration emerged from Extreme
programming
Question you would like to answer...
 Does my code work?

And
Does it still work after I committed new code?
Agile approach
 Write a unit test!

● Executable specification
● Automatic evaluation
● A simple test environment
● Instant feedback
● Used as regression test
Detect problems in the earliest possible stage
● Defacto standard for unit testing of PHP
applications
● Member of the xUnit family
● Inspired by tools like Junit, TestNG, Junitour,
JExample etc.
● Latest stable version 3.4.0 (released 16
September 2009)
Things to keep in mind...
Unit tests should run in less than 1 ms
 Software testing categories

● Small – Unit tests

● Check conditional logic in the code
● No debugger required
● Runs in less than 1 ms
● Small – Functional tests
● Check whether the interface between classes abide
by their contacts
Does PHP Unit only run tests?
 Other things PHPUnit can do

● Skeleton generation
● Integration of Selennium
PHP Unit and code coverage analyses
 PHP Unit and code coverage analyses

● Helps you with analyzing which statements,

branches and paths are executed within the
test run:
● Statement coverage
● Branch coverage
● Path coverage
● 100% code coverage is preferred, but does not
say anything about the test completeness!
Coding standards...
PHP Code Sniffer (phpcs)
 PHP Code Sniffer “Sniffs”...

● PHP
● Javascript
● CSS
To detect violations of defined coding standards
with as main goal to ensure code remains clean
and consistent.
Following coding standards are default available:
MySource, PHPCS, Zend, PEAR and Squiz
An example run
 Other available tools

● PHP copy/paste detector

● PHP Depend – software metric tool
● PHP Loc – Lines of code analyses
● PHP PMD – Project Mess Detector

Note: only copy/paste detection will be part of this presentation

Copy/paste detection
 Code duplication (phpcd)

● Code is marked duplicate when two sequences

of code are:
● Textually identical
● Token for token identical
● Functionally identical
● Problems
● Duplication of code contradicts code reuse
● Co-evolution of clones hinders maintenance
Example run
How it all can be put together?
Pick your continuous build environment
 General mode of operation

● Developer commits code

● Commit triggers a build (initiated by versioning
system, or by polling the version system)
● Build script is run
● Output is processed, notification send
Cruisecontrol and PHPUndercontrol
Ant is used to process the build
Remember...
A fool with a tool is still a fool!
 One of the hardest things to express about
continuous integration is that makes a
fundamental shift to the whole development
pattern, one that isn't easy to see if you've never
worked in an environment that practices it. In fact
most people do see this atmosphere if they are
working solo - because then they only integrate
with themselves. For many people team
development just comes with certain problems
that are part of the territory. Continuous
integration reduces these problems, in
exchange for a certain amount of discipline.
 The end...
Acknowledgement
● Part of this presentation was inspired
by “The State of QA Tools for PHP”
from Sabastian Bergmann
About me and this presentation
● Personal blog can be found on
http://www.jfoobar.org
● Slides will be uploaded to
http://slideshare.net/willebil
● Follow me on twitter:
http://twitter.com/willebil
Links
● PHPUnit - http://www.phpunit.de
● PHP Code sniffer -
http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer/
● PHP copy/paste detector -
http://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpcpd/
● Cruisecontrol -
http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
● PHP Under control - http://phpundercontrol.org/
● Bamboo -
http://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo/
● PHP lines of code -
http://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phploc