Expanding on the previous post about how much testing may be too much, they're back with another post in the series, this time focusing on the "economy of tests". This time Mathias is joined by Konstantin Kudryashov as a co-author.

A common complaint with teams that first try their hand at automated testing, is that it is hard, costly, and not worth the effort. On the other hand, supporters say that it saves them time. In this post, we'll try to add some nuance to the discussion. We'll take a look at how different levels of automated testing affect the cost of development, both in the short and the long term, for both greenfield and brownfield projects. Finally, we'll look at a simple strategy for introducing tests and migrating them across test levels, in order to reduce maintenance costs.

They start with some baseline definitions so everyone's on the same page - unit test, integration testing and system testing. The article also covers some of the basic kinds of testing metrics including execution speed, fragility and understandability. It then moves on and looks at the other major final factor in the overall cost of testing, the age of the project (new vs existing). He mentions the Testing Pyramid, how it's recommended to migrate tests and some of the common opposing forces to the test migration/creation.

Brandon Savage has a new look at an old problem in the PHP community - the importance of a developers' understanding of marketing in applications.

Technical people seem particularly bad at marketing effectively. I think this is because we’re fact-oriented, focused on the features and neat ideas our products include. We’ll spend pages and pages talking about the cool things that our tool or application can do. And then we’ll wonder why our client didn’t buy it. Why do we do this? Because we forget that marketing isn’t about features it’s about meeting needs.

He points to the hierarchy of needs as an example of what really has to be considered when developing software. The further down the pyramid you and your software can go, the more effective your marketing can be. An application can do everything under the sun, but if it doesn't do what the customer wants, it'll be tossed aside.