Throughout the last few months we have actively participated in a huge number of conferences all over the world — San Francisco, London, New York, Prague, Copenhagen, Cologne, just to name few. Our latest stop has been at phpCE, a Polish conference for PHP developers. Let’s take a look at some of things we learned, and what others learned from us.
Start Smoking, Get Confidence — HTTP Smoke Testing
It is usually quite difficult to start with automatic testing of an existing web application. You may have heard that applications must be written to be “testable”. But what if you still want assurance that your refactoring didn’t cause the application to crash? Even if your application is testable, that doesn’t necessarily stop you or other people from skipping writing tests in order to “save” some time — because let’s face it, an application can still be used even without automatic tests.
Our developer Petr Heinz gave a speech on this very topic. He presented our package for HTTP smoke testing (available on Github) that:
- makes it easy to start testing with any Symfony web application
- automatically tests new pages / actions
- is so cheap to use that you will not even think about skipping writing tests
Although there was some stiff competition in the next presentation room, Petr still drew a rich audience and very positive feedback.
Even though a recording of the presentation is not available yet, you can take a look at Petr’s brief talk from SymfonyLive San Francisco on the same topic to get an overview on how we test at Shopsys Framework.
The smoke tests are one layer of a 5-level testing approach we use at Shopsys Framework and together with unit, integration, acceptance, and performance tests ensure that critical scenarios are covered and even inexperienced developers can work on a project without fear of causing errors.
Other interesting presentations
Besides several workshops, phpCE provided its participants with about 50 presentations. Here some of them we found interesting:
- Uncommon (Ab)Uses of Composer (Allain Schlesser) — great examples of what all can you do with Composer, slides here
- Domain-Specific Assertions (Sebastian Bergmann) — a very interesting speech by an author of PHPUnit, who also recommended a book Domain-Driven Design
- The GDPR is coming, are you ready? (Michelangelo van Dam) — a presentation about GDPR from a developer’s point of view, slides here
Our other PHP developer, Rostislav Vítek, got his first speaking experience abroad and had great success with a presentation on CRUD and why it is a bad idea. We have recently published an article about this topic on our blog.
phpCE 2017 was the first edition of a community conference for PHP programmers and enthusiasts. The meeting was established by merging two successful nation-wide events: PHPCon Poland and Brno PHP Conference and we have to say that although it was not one of the most distant conferences we have been to, it was definitely one of the best organised. The next year’s phpCE is supposed to be in the Czech Republic, so see you there!
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