A group of winners of PHP elePHPhants or TestFest mugs have been picked at random from the people that contributed the 887 tests during the 2009 PHP TestFest.

Winners of the elePHPants included Patrick Allaert, Fabio Fabbrucci and Jason Easter. Winners receiving a mug including Havard Eide, Francesco Fullone, Daniel Convissor. Congrats to all winners and many thanks go out to everyone who helped make the event such a success!

So finally we are at the end of the 2009 PHP TestFest. It has been an outstanding success with the coverage increasing by about 2.5% overall and 887 new tests contributed in the TestFest SVN repository of which 637 have already been added to PHP CVS. [...] There still are few loose ends to tie up - the TestFest SVN repository will be closed for contributions later this week and the last few tests will be moved into the main PHP repository.

They have a few prizes to give out (elePHPants and TestFest mugs) to hand out to randomly selected test contributors. Several notes of thanks also go out from the organizers to groups like IBM, iBuilidings, Zend, Microsoft and Zend.

Yesterday saw the PHP North West User Group hold their first Test Fest in Manchester. As a relatively young user group (at less than a year old) with not a single @php.net email address between us, this was an ambitious venture. Scott MacVicar very kindly offered to come and be our mentor - to show us around PHP and get us started writing tests, and in fact he did very well and everyone was able to begin quite quickly.

She mentions the fourteen attendees, eighty-four tests created and the encouragement it gave for those developers to write even more. You can see photos taken at the event here.

I spent the last weekend (may 09/10) on the PHP Testfest Berlin, organized by Till for the Berlin PHP Usergroup. Coming from Leipzig, I don't really know who of the other 8 people were from the user group and who not.

He mentions issues the group faced (OS X being difficult, PHP from CVS not compiling), the intro to testing and their first area of choice - gettext (which they got up to 98.8% coverage!). The second and third efforts were some work done on the intl and sockets extensions.

We decided to test the SQLite3 extension, and we also had two people writing tests for LDAP. With a nice end result of 24 tests written for SQLite3 and 9 for LDAP, we are very pleased with the result since only 9 people attended our event. Our mentor Felix De Vliegher had given us a very clear instructions and apparently most attendees already had seen my (and other people's) slides on slideshare.net. See the pictures of those great moments on flicr.com.

You can check out some of the impact that they and other TestFesters made this past weekend in the PHP 5.3 code coverage report.

It feels like a long time since we started on this road in February 2009. So much has happened since then ... and now we are two days away from the 9th May when several European groups will run events. We have 22 groups registered in all, Munich and Quebec have already run successful events. [...] It's great to see user groups helping out with PHP development in this way - I'm just amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and talent of PHP users.

She takes a second to thank sponsors - including Microsoft and Ibuildings (including their swag). The event will last through the end of June and test numbers will be calculated and evaluated for inclusion quickly after. You can get an idea of the current testing runs here.

The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.

She points out some of the European TestFest events that Ibuildings is helping out with including ones in London, Manchester and Belgium. You can find out more about TestFest-ing and see if there's a group in your area participating on the TestFest page off the main PHP QA site.

Last year's TestFest was a huge success. The worldwide initiatives by usergroups and individuals gave a nice addition to the code coverage for PHP itself. This year, the TestFest period has been extended to 3 months, starting the beginning of this month and ending end of june. But a nice bunch of European usergroups including the Dutch usergroup are combining TestFest on may 9th!

TestFest events are happening all over the world - you can see if there's one near you on this page of the PHP.net wiki. For those attending php|tek this year, there'll also be a TestFest going on during the Hackathon event (read our interview about the event here).

Our event will be on 9th May - you can sign up to attend (limited places so do let us know) on the upcoming page for this event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2299548/. The idea behind Test Fest is twofold: firstly, to give an approachable way for PHP developers to contribute back to the core - we'll learn how to write tests on the day and can continue to do so after the event of course! Secondly, PHP itself gets better tests, and the language itself gets better. All in all, I can't see a reason not to do it!

If you're not in the area of Manchester (or even in the same country) you still might have a group near you participating - check out this page on the PHP.net wiki to find one close (ten countries are represented so far).

So here we are at the beginning of the 2009 TestFest. There are currently 16 PHP user groups intending to participate, these are pretty widely distributed from Brazil, the USA and Europe.

The repository is open and available for the submissions the groups might make (more info here and here on testing procedures and how to submit the results) and you can always join the IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network - #phptestfest. You'll find plenty of help and conversation about writing tests and getting them where they need to go.