The Inviqa blog has posted an article that seeks to debunk some common testing myths when it comes to ensuring quality in software development (and its results). They cover eleven different points with a rebuttal for each, refuting them as excuses and possible misunderstandings.

Software testing has been around for many years now but over this time some incorrect assumptions have arisen about what testing is, what the process involves and how the process of testing can add value to the software development process. Here we take a look at some of the more common myths about testing and, from a tester’s point of view, provide correct and valid information for each point.

Among the myths they cover are things like:

• "Bugs come from lazy developers"
• "If we test it for long enough, we’ll catch all of the bugs"
• "Developers and testers are like cat and dog"
• "Testing is boring"
• "We don’t need testers"

Each includes a paragraph or two of content pointing out the problems with the statement and offering some constructive ways to help solve it in your organization.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the first part of a new series of articles showing you how to use (and secure) Jenkins, the popular continuous integration tool, to bring more quality to your PHP-based applications.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about PHP-CI, which you can use as a continuous integration tool for your PHP projects. Within this article I indicated I still liked Jenkins the most as a CI tool. Time to dive into Jenkins and see how we can set this up for our PHP project.

In this first part of the series helps you get Jenkins installed via a package and configure it on the server. He then gets into the steps to secure the installation: configuring users, turning off signups and the type of security to set up (they choose matrix-based). He wraps up the article with a look at installing some useful plugins and using a template to use as a base for setting up your projects.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today with what it calls the eight must- have PHP QA tools to ensure the overall quality of your codebase. These tools cover everything from unit testing out to ensuring code standards are met.

The [QA Tools] site is a simple list of interesting tools that can help you properly test your application, while also analyzing it and producing interesting data for you to look at. This post will be little more than a re-iteration of some of those tools with added information, use cases and advice about them – however, we’re open to expanding this list with other QA tools you throw our way that get plenty of votes in the comments below or seem interesting and/or useful enough.

Their list of eight covers a wide range of QA needs:

• PHPUnit
• Behat
• vfsStream
• PHPLOC
• PHP Mess Detector
• PHP CodeSniffer
• Dead Code Detector
• Copy Paste Detector

For each there's a brief description and some of the commands you'll need to get it installed. Configuring them for your environment is a bit out of the scope of the article, though, so you'll have to pick that up on your own.

In this new post to the "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects" site today, Sebastian Bergmann gives a status update for the English version of their popular (currently German-only) PHP QA book.

The video below [in the post] shows a visualization of activity in the book's Git repository since April 2010. During this timeframe we mostly worked on translating chapters from English to German and editing the chapters for the German edition followed by translating chapters from German to English and editing the English edition's chapters.

The visualization shows the work on the English translation all but stopped at its conclusion. As it stands, the book is scheduled to ship on May 10th, 2011 as Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications. You can pick up your copy over on Amazon if you'd like to reserve one before the shipping date.

According to this new post on the Mayflower blog, the PHP_CodeBrowser PEAR package has finally reached a stable state.

We already wrote about CodeBrowser 0.9 in August and after fixing a few minor bugs the Mayflower Open Source Labs Team is very happy to present PHP_CodeBrowser 1.0.0.

The PHP_CodeBrowser package allows quality assurance tools (like PHPUnit) to create enhanced output including syntax highlighting and colored error sections. It comes with some basic template, CSS, Javascript and image files as well as a plugin system to allow for custom handling of certain error types. You can install it from the pear.phpunit.de PEAR channel or you can check out the source on github.