The QaFoo team has made available a tool they've created to track changes in PHP projects, the QaFoo Changetrack tool.

Since quite some time I've talked to people about the idea for a tool that tracks changes in the classes and methods of your PHP project in order to detect which entities are changed most frequently, which are often affected bugs and other statistics. After some hacking, we are now making it available on Github.

The tool includes a few commands including one that analyzes the project you point it at (and makes an XML defining its changesets) and another that provides a report of how often a certain method is involved in a change. The post includes an example using the Twig Github repository noting that, because of the analysis being done on each checkout, can take quite a while depending on the age of the project.

The QaFoo group has announced a giveaway they're doing of a ticket to this year's PHP Unconference Europe:

PHP Unconference Europe is an amazing PHP community meet-up. We would love to help you experience this event and therefore raffle 2 x 1 ticket (viable for non-german as well as german participants). In order to take part in the raffle, just complete the following sentence in a Tweet: "PHP quality is … /cc @qafoo". Replace the "…" with something that you consider important for software quality in your PHP projects and CC our Twitter account (required).

If you haven't heard about the PHP Unfonference Europe, it's a yearly unconference style community event where the participants set out the schedule based on who wants to present and what they want to hear when the event starts. It's less about formal presentations and more about discussion and and "experience sharing." It will be happening May 4th and 5th in Manchester, UK.

As Tobias Schlitt points out in this recent post to the Qafoo blog, the recording of a webinar he did (for Zend) about "Writing Testable Code" has been posted for listening online.

In this session you will gain insight into the secret of writing easily testable code and you'll learn how this relates essentially to good object orientation.

The recording is just one of many webinars Zend offers on a wide range of development topics, including:

• Design Patterns in PHP
• Multibyte string handling in PHP with the mbstring extension
• Strong Cryptography in PHP
• Using Jenkins/Hudson for Continuous Builds

Almost all presentations also come with PDF versions of their slides attached, too.