Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects.
I’ve got some decent experience writing unit tests with PHPUnit, using a smoke testing script, and even writing use cases (it’s been a while, though).
Generally speaking, my perception is that software development shops that really care about and emphasize quality have processes that consist of things such as:
- Writing use cases
- Performing code reviews
- Unit testing
- Continuous integration
- Writing test cases and test plans (ala a Quality Assurance department)
…and so on.
For those of you that happen to read my blog, what do you think? Do you use these types of quality control measures? If so, have you used them for a long time, or did you one day wake up and realize “Gee, I need to be doing more for quality control”? If you’re not using them, why aren’t you? Lack of time, budgetary constraints, etc.? Or are you just not aware of them?
Just some food for thought. Please leave comments here or email me (brian at deshong dot net) if you’d like to provide some input.