In a new post to his site long time PHP community member Ben Ramsey has officially announced PHP Testfest 2017, an event that gathers developers to write tests for the PHP language itself to help improve its quality and show them how to contribute back to the project.

For those who’ve been around the PHP community for a while, you’ll recall the successful PHP TestFest events that began after a discussion at PHP Quebec in 2008. Many user groups and mentors signed on to host and help with events, and a lot of folks became first-time contributors to the PHP project, helping improve our code coverage. It ran strong in a global sense from 2008 to 2010. After that, various groups (particularly the Brazilian groups) have continued the tradition.

A few months ago, at php[tek] in Atlanta, I mentioned to Michelangelo that I’d love to bring back PHP TestFest. Sammy had given an excellent talk on writing PHPT tests, and <a href="https://twitter.com/ellotheth/status/868583446498734084>Gemma tweeted a link to the old PHP TestFest wiki page. From there, things snowballed.

Ben the provides the details of the planned Testfest that will run for four months and can be worked on from anywhere, not just one single event. The plan is to have it run from September through December of 2017 and there's plenty of support to help out. Organizers can email for more help getting started. There's also a website, Google Group and IRC channel as well as tools and resources to help bring you up to speed on testing the PHP language with phpt tests.

There's a quick post over on Stefan Koopmanschap's blog about the recently wrapped Dutch PHP TestFest that happened in conjunction with the PFZ.nl and AmsterdamPHP user groups.

The PHP TestFest that Dutch usergroups PFZ.nl and AmsterdamPHP organized last saturday was a huge success. About 15 people made their way to the office of WEBclusive to collaborate with three key figures from the PHP-world, who travelled to Amsterdam to be a mentor, to write tests for PHP.

He mentions some of the work that was done including updates to tests on the Gearman extension, the MongoDB extension and others worked on the tests for PHP's core. Fifty-four new tests were written during the event and testers even continued writing after they left - win all around!

Ben Longden has a new post announcing a TestFest happening in September put on by the PHPNW group.

I am very pleased to announce this years PHPNW TestFest over at MadLab in Manchester. The event will take place on Saturday 11th September from 12pm until sometime around 5-6pm. Lunch will be provided (courtesy of our sponsor, Ibuildings), and I daresay we may wish to make an bit of an evening of it at a local bar...

You can find full details on the event on the PHP.net wiki as well as register if you have interest in attending. The even will happening Saturday, September 11th from 12pm until around 5-6pm.

The PHPBenelux group has officially announced the TestFest event they'll be holding for this year on June 5th (2010).

It has become a tradition for PHPBenelux to organize our instance of PHP TestFest, and this year will be no different! All PHP developers are invited to join us again this year for PHP TestFest 2010, which will take place in Maastricht on Saturday June 5th. Participating in the TestFest is completely free and open for everyone, members and non-members.

The only requirement is that participants must bring their own equipment to work on and that you have at least a little experience with writing PHP (you'll need it for the tests). This year's event will take place at Hoogbrugstraat 1 in Maastricht and will start around 10am and go until 4pm to try to get as many tests done as possible. Don't worry if you don't know how to write the tests - there'll be plenty of people to show you how!

If you'd like to attend the event, RSVP today so they can know how many to expect.

Zoe Slattery has posted an update about the TestFest events happening around the world and the contributions they've been making to the overall cause of getting PHP code coverage as complete as possible.

Groups from all over the world have contributed 554 new tests for PHP since April 1st 2009. Of these, 327 have already been moved into PHP's CVS (thanks Felipe!). The results of running tests on a Linux 32 bit platform can be seen here (sorry about the colour scheme), the user groups who have contributed are also listed. We also run the tests on a 64 bit Linux platform here, but this only runs PHP5.3 and PHP5.2.

She's also run some complete code coverage tests (after fighting a bit with ccache and lcov) and came up with a two percent increase overall (including a huge jump in the ext/ldap extension's coverage from about nine percent up to almost ninety percent!)

Lorna Mitchell has posted about her own experiences at her local TestFest as hosted by the PHP North West group in Manchester.

Yesterday saw the PHP North West User Group hold their first Test Fest in Manchester. As a relatively young user group (at less than a year old) with not a single @php.net email address between us, this was an ambitious venture. Scott MacVicar very kindly offered to come and be our mentor - to show us around PHP and get us started writing tests, and in fact he did very well and everyone was able to begin quite quickly.

She mentions the fourteen attendees, eighty-four tests created and the encouragement it gave for those developers to write even more. You can see photos taken at the event here.

Christian Weiske has posted about his experience at this year's TestFest in Belin (as hosted by the Berlin PHP User Group).

I spent the last weekend (may 09/10) on the PHP Testfest Berlin, organized by Till for the Berlin PHP Usergroup. Coming from Leipzig, I don't really know who of the other 8 people were from the user group and who not.

He mentions issues the group faced (OS X being difficult, PHP from CVS not compiling), the intro to testing and their first area of choice - gettext (which they got up to 98.8% coverage!). The second and third efforts were some work done on the intl and sockets extensions.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted some of his experiences at this year's TestFest organized by the PHPBelgium group.

We decided to test the SQLite3 extension, and we also had two people writing tests for LDAP. With a nice end result of 24 tests written for SQLite3 and 9 for LDAP, we are very pleased with the result since only 9 people attended our event. Our mentor Felix De Vliegher had given us a very clear instructions and apparently most attendees already had seen my (and other people's) slides on slideshare.net. See the pictures of those great moments on flicr.com.

You can check out some of the impact that they and other TestFesters made this past weekend in the PHP 5.3 code coverage report.

Zoe Slattery has posted some about how the TestFest effort is going this year and what the response has been from the PHP community in general.

It feels like a long time since we started on this road in February 2009. So much has happened since then ... and now we are two days away from the 9th May when several European groups will run events. We have 22 groups registered in all, Munich and Quebec have already run successful events. [...] It's great to see user groups helping out with PHP development in this way - I'm just amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and talent of PHP users.

She takes a second to thank sponsors - including Microsoft and Ibuildings (including their swag). The event will last through the end of June and test numbers will be calculated and evaluated for inclusion quickly after. You can get an idea of the current testing runs here.

On the IBuildings blog there's a new post by Soila Patajoki taking a brief look at TestFest events around the world.

The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.

She points out some of the European TestFest events that Ibuildings is helping out with including ones in London, Manchester and Belgium. You can find out more about TestFest-ing and see if there's a group in your area participating on the TestFest page off the main PHP QA site.