I've been watching the Destroy All Software back catalog over the last couple of months and it's really inspired me to up my TDD game. I'm still fairly new to TDD, I've written tests for a long time, but never really let it lead my development…

He talks about the testing tool he uses and some of the ideals he keeps in mind when developing his tests. He also comments on testing isolation, speed of execution, the "fail fast" idea as well as integration testing and continuous integration.

It may seem strange but I'd like to start out with giving my opinion on this book: It is brilliant! If you don't like reading my post you at least know what you should do next: buy the friggin' book. The book offers some theory concerning agile development, (unit-)testing and code quality but its killer feature is the almost 200 page long example of developing an application the TDD way! In the rest of this post I will shortly highlight different parts of the books and stuff I enjoyed or learned from it.

He breaks up the review in to a few different parts - the process of test-driven development, his "first real lesson", their working example and a section about the more advanced topic of sustainable test driven development.

Meszaros Marton and other PHP coders have started a Test-Driven Development project centered on showing the methodology to new adopters in a green field. The goal of the project, named Munchkin, is creating a feed aggregator - like Google Reader - from scratch. The authors will post a series of articles about their development process along the way. If you want to follow a step-by-step guide to implementing an Agile project with TDD in PHP, follow them.

Their goal is to show you not only how TDD can make your application better but detailed tutorials on setting up your environment and making effective use of the tools in an agile environment.

MakeGood provides a test runner to run unit tests on Eclipse PDT. MakeGood strongly supports Test Driven Development (TDD) by various features.

Features in the plugin include:

• Runs all tests when a file is saved.
• Debugs a test.
• Reruns the last test.
• Can use the system include path when running tests.

It supports both PHPUnit and SimpleTest so you're covered either way. It also supports the Zend Debugger and Xdebug for help with your debugging needs.

However, as useful as the series [from Jani Hartikainen on TTD] is, it doesn't provide answers to Zend Framework specific testing issues (and considering all the ZF-specific posts on his site, that's quite surprising). [...] In the coming weeks, I'll put together a how-to on testing ZF applications using a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach. With TDD tests are written first and as such the test suite guides the design of the production code.

He shows how to set up a sample application, the Jira Base, and how to set up a simple base-level test.

The difference between "normal" and test-driven development (TDD) is that when doing TDD, you write unit tests for your new code before writing the code itself. This way you ensure good test coverage for your code, and your code will also be more flexible and reusable, as you have to design the class interfaces for easy testing.

He looks at some of the basics - like preconditions and postconditions - and how to create the tests for your application before you write a single line of (non-test) code. His examples show evaluations for testing for an empty order and to see if an object has an item in it after it's been added.

Symfony is one of the few PHP frameworks that gives you basic tools for starting to write tests. [...] Symfony also provides an extension of this class called sfTestBrowser, designed especially for functional tests, which has all the abilities of the sfBrowser object plus some smart assert methods.

He uses this sfTestBrowser object to run an example test on a same get() call's response. It should match the regular expression of "/This is a temporary page/" but doesn't so it fails. Writing up tests like this for new parts of your application first would be considered test-driven development and the Symfony framework makes that simple.

Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn Reiersøl et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.

Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:

• Basic PHP tools and concepts
• Developing applications via Test Driven Development
• Web presentation and user interfaces
• Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction