On DZone.com today there's an update about recent additions to Paratest, the parallel PHPUnit test runner (created by Brian Scaturro). He talks some about the benefits of running tests in parallel and shares some of the recent contributions to the project from other developers.

I've already written about my experiments with Paratest. Paratest is a PHPUnit wrapper that allows you to run tests written for PHPUnit in parallel, making us of multiple processes running on the same machine. In a world where cycle time is an important metric, trading resources to get the test suite to finish earlier is a net gain; especially when you're stepping on unstable stones and run the suite very often.

He (Giorgio Sironi) has contributed a new test runner to the project - the "WrapperRunner" that limits the number of processes spawned by the parallel testing tool. Another contribution came from Dimitris Baltas involving the addition of a TEST_TOKEN variable that can be used to uniquely identify each process as they're executing.

Lorna Mitchell has posted about some of her experience in being the lead on the open source Joind.in project, broken up into a few different topics including community, roadmaps and transparency.

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place. [...] These are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important.

She talks about:

• The importance of fostering a good community around the project
• Providing good documentation (README in this case) for people new to the project
• Having a clear vision of the future of the project (roadmap)
• Dealing with the code contributed to the project - good and bad
• Having transparency with the contributors and anyone wanting to find out more about the project

Want to get involved? Check out Joind.in on github for more details and the source for the site.