In a new blog entry, Alexander Netkachev writes about his experiences with the automatic testing of applications developed with the Zend Framework.

This article contains information on how to improve your application stability by controlling how the changes affect the Model-View-Controller Zend Framework application. As a result, you will be able to deliver better software to your customers and reduce the time needed for testing of the software.

He breaks the post out into several different sections:

• Testing should be automatic
• Program tests program
• MVC improves testability
• MVC application creating is easy with Zend Framework
• Select and modify data to test Model
• View is simple but unsteady
• Testing View includes testing Ajax
• Use cases show how to test Controller

before getting down to an example. His example shows hos to test the part of an application that handles the new user registrations/logins. The setup is pretty simple - a user table with a UsersController - and the corresponding model and views to go with it. He chooses PHPUnit to perform the testing and gives all the code you'll need to reproduce the example, including the SQL and the testing scripts (and the output you should recieve by running them).