On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted another article from author Christopher Pitt. This time he talks about snapshot testing and if it's a viable way to evaluate code in PHP applications.

Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it. For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.

You probably write a lot of PHP code, but today I want to talk about something I learned in JavaScript. We’ll learn about what snapshot testing is and then see how it can help us write better PHP applications.

He starts with a brief introduction to the technology to be used (React in Javascript) and how it could be recreated in PHP. He then covers testing interfaces, evaluating the correct functionality of frontends via various testing tools. He includes some examples of this kind of testing and how it can help a developer mentally break up functionality into components. From there he switches over to the PHP side, introducing the spatie/phpunit-snapshot-assertions package and showing how to use it to check the make up of a snapshot and test several assertions that should exist.

The Loosely Coupled podcast, with hosts and PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has posted their latest episode today - episode #24: Minimum Viable Product.

In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the concept of a minimum viable product and what it means to us as developers. The concept of an MVP is simple but it often gets used as an excuse to put out poorly-implemented products. Listen as Jeff and Matt discuss their opinions about the problems with MVP in our industry and how we as developers can fight against them.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.