In a recent post to his blog Clay Loveless looks at something he believes is important to create quality software in any organization - continuous deployment (CD).

I’m no continuous deployment expert, but it’s gotten some attention after yesterday’s highlight at an Etsy board meeting. Companies making the most of continuous deployment were designed to do so from the very early stages. [...] It takes a lot of discipline to implement all of the [testing methods and development cycles]. It takes even more to make sure that these kinds of processes get put in place early in a company's life.

The parts of a successful continuous deployment process include unit testing, a controlled feature cycle, black box testing and good instrumentation to keep track of it all. Clay wonders why, when there's so many tools and information out there about CD, companies still wouldn't implement it. He notes that putting it in after the fact is very rare and is usually avoided by the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.

On the "PHP in Action" blog, Dagfinn Reiersol has posted some ideas about developing PHP applications (really, any applications) from scratch - by faking it.

So where and how on earth do you start? Let's say we know one thing about the result; call it the known fact. Do we start by making educated guesses about what should be in the black box? A lot of development is like that.

Enough of this philosophical mumbo-jumbo; what does it mean in practice? Well, it's test-driven development, and more specifically, it's what Kent Beck calls the Fake It patttern. You implement a test for the result, then you hard code the result. It's an absolutely weird idea that's magical in its effect because it get you started. And as the German expression goes, aller Anfang ist schwer--all beginnings are difficult.

He illustrates the point with a set of code examples - one side being the unit test (written first, of course) and the other the actual code. All it does is set a URL to a variable inside a class, but the point is made.

Starting at the high level is good when you know the full scope of the project, but that's not always a possibility. This is a good alternative to getting started without causing too many issues down the road.

On the "PHP in Action" blog, Dagfinn Reiersol has posted some ideas about developing PHP applications (really, any applications) from scratch - by faking it.

So where and how on earth do you start? Let's say we know one thing about the result; call it the known fact. Do we start by making educated guesses about what should be in the black box? A lot of development is like that.

Enough of this philosophical mumbo-jumbo; what does it mean in practice? Well, it's test-driven development, and more specifically, it's what Kent Beck calls the Fake It patttern. You implement a test for the result, then you hard code the result. It's an absolutely weird idea that's magical in its effect because it get you started. And as the German expression goes, aller Anfang ist schwer--all beginnings are difficult.

He illustrates the point with a set of code examples - one side being the unit test (written first, of course) and the other the actual code. All it does is set a URL to a variable inside a class, but the point is made.

Starting at the high level is good when you know the full scope of the project, but that's not always a possibility. This is a good alternative to getting started without causing too many issues down the road.