The php|architect blog has posted the second part of Cal Evans' series looking at the typical lifecycle of a project - Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production.

In the previous part of this series, we discussed the main pieces needed for a proper development environment. However, there are other, smaller pieces, scripts, subsystems and other very important components of a properly-configured development environment that don’t fit in the acronym.

This second part of the series looks at the "T" in DTAP - testing. It mentions unit testing, integration testing and regression testing. He also touches briefly on "refresh scripts" to handle data updates or pushes out to another stage of the process.

Cal Evans has posted the first part of his look at DTAP - development, testing, acceptance and production - and how it applies to PHP development.

There are four primary systems that need to be set up and isolated. And they are described by the acronym DTAP—Development, Testing, Acceptance, and Production. One thing that has changed recently, though, is that these systems no longer have to mean separate hardware.

He gives an overview of each, setting out definitions to be used for the rest of the series with the next part discussing some of the "smaller moving pieces" of the process.