I'm exploring an approach to automated code review: it's not as precise as the human-based one, but it scales better. [...] All in all, automated code reviews, performed with tools instead of with human intellect, can be a starting point to search for the problematic zones of a codebase. Then the human may come in, since they also have to clean up the code: their intervention was already scheduled.

The tools he mentions (and, in some cases, shows how to install/use) are:

• PHPUnit
• PHP_Depend
• PHP_CodeSniffer
• PHP Mess Detector (pmd)
• the Jenkins job template

PHPsrc is a plugin that allow you to run PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPUnit, PHP Depend and PHP Copy/Paste Detector directly in Eclipse. The site also says that more tools should come. As you work, you will see any transgression you make. That will save you from breaking the build, but it also makes it easier to fix the problem. After all, you just wrote the faulty lines of code.

He walks you through the install of the plugin and shows you how to set things up to point to the executables on your development environment (complete with some screenshots). There's even an example of the output for a particularly offensive (standards-wise, of course) piece of code.

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.

He talks a bit about each tool and how they should be used to find and treat a lot of the issues that could come up in your application development. Since the author of the PHP_Depend tool, Manuel Pichler, works for the company, they'll be supporting it as well as offering services for integrating it into your workflow.

Sometimes the parsing and analysis process of PHP_Depend can consume a lot of time to finish, so I always put the shell aside and do something different. Normally I take a look at the shell every few minutes to check if the process has finished, but it also happens that I totally forget that I have started a PHP_Depend process on my system. So I need something that says to me, "Hey, mapi PHP_Depend has finished its job...", and here comes D-BUS in the game.

With the help of the DBus extension, he made a way to have the PHP_Depend process send a message (in his case one similar to a Growl popup) when the dependency checking is done. You'll need the 0.9.0 branch to get the "notify-me" command line option to make it all work.

He's laid out a map of the tools that can all interact to create a more robust environment for automatically building and testing your code. Here's his list:

• PHP_CodeSniffer
• phpmd
• phpcpd
• PHP_Depend
• PHPUnit

The results of all of these tools running on your code is then fed into the CruiseControl instance and passed off to phpUnderControl for final deployment.