Leonid Mamchenkov has posted a "quick and easy introduction" to PHPMD, the "PHP mess detector" tool. PHPMD automatically scans your code looking for potential issues including "suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions and unused parameters, methods, properties".

PHP Mess Detector is yet another one of those tools that help to keep the code base manageable and clean. Here is how you can jump right in. It’s super easy. It only takes 6 steps.

He gives an example of it in use on a CakePHP plugin showing the process to install, execute and view the report it provides. He looks in detail at one of the issues it found, an unused local variable, and how he fixed the issue and pushed the result back to the main repository. He finishes up with some suggestions about ways to run the tool, integrating it into your automated workflow and using it on other Open Source projects to find "low hanging" issues to fix and contribute back.

On the QaFoo blog today Manuel Pichler has written up a guide to help you write a custom rule to use with the PHP Mess Detector (PHPMD) as extended from some of the current rules (it's always easier to start from examples).

Let us start with some architecture basics behind PHPMD. All rules in PHPMD must at least implement the PHP_PMD_Rule interface. You can also extend the abstract rule base class PHP_PMD_AbstractRule which already provides an implementation of all required infrastructure methods and application logic, so that the only task which is left to you is the implementation of the concrete validation code of your rule.

He walks you through some sample code and talks about some of the common interfaces that are available to your testing. He takes one of them, IFunctionAware, and looks at it specifically, showing how to use it to detect and add violations for the validation. He includes an example of writing a rule based on an existing software metric (in this case, the number of public methods). There's also bit at the end showing how to write a rule based on the "abstract syntax tree" to be able to check just about anything in the code you're looking to test.

In one of his latest entries, Sebastian Bergmann answers a question from another blogger about the future of software metrics and project mess detection as a part of the PHPUnit project.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.

Sebastian Bergmann spotlights another feature of the upcoming PHPUnit version 3.2 - the inclusion of a Project Mess Detector's ability to help find duplicate code.

Duplicate code can be hard to find, especially in a large project. Johann-Peter Hartmann of MAYFLOWER GmbH recently implemented Copy & Paste Detection for PHPUnit's growing set of features that extends its usage scenarios beyond "just unit testing" to a one-stop solution for quality assurance in PHP-based projects.

In his example, Sebastian shows what the response will look like when the tests find duplicate code - giving details like the files involved and the code fragment that was duplicated.

Check out this list in another post on Sebastian's blog for more of the metrics that will be included in the upcoming version.

Sebastian Bergmann spotlights another feature of the upcoming PHPUnit version 3.2 - the inclusion of a Project Mess Detector's ability to help find duplicate code.

Duplicate code can be hard to find, especially in a large project. Johann-Peter Hartmann of MAYFLOWER GmbH recently implemented Copy & Paste Detection for PHPUnit's growing set of features that extends its usage scenarios beyond "just unit testing" to a one-stop solution for quality assurance in PHP-based projects.

In his example, Sebastian shows what the response will look like when the tests find duplicate code - giving details like the files involved and the code fragment that was duplicated.

Check out this list in another post on Sebastian's blog for more of the metrics that will be included in the upcoming version.