Test-Driven Development with PHP 8: Build extensible, reliable, and maintainable enterprise-level applications using TDD and BDD with PHP

by Rainier Sarabia

A PHP developer's practical guide to planning, writing, and deploying maintainable and extensible software solutions with automated tests in a well-structured way PHP web developers end up building complex enterprise projects without prior experience in test-driven and behavior-driven development which results in software that's complex and difficult to maintain. This step-by-step guide helps you manage the complexities of large-scale web applications. It takes you through the processes of working on a project, starting from understanding business requirements and translating them into actual maintainable software, to automated deployments. You'll learn how to break down business requirements into workable and actionable lists using Jira. Using those organized lists of business requirements, you'll understand how to implement behavior-driven development (BDD) and test-driven development (TDD) to start writing maintainable PHP code. You'll explore how to use the automated tests to help you stop introducing regressions to an application each time you release code by using continuous integration. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to start a PHP project, break down the requirements, build test scenarios and automated tests, and write more testable and maintainable PHP code. By learning these processes, you'll be able to develop more maintainable, and reliable enterprise PHP applications. This book is for PHP software developers looking to implement TDD and BDD in their projects. An understanding of object-oriented programming is required to get the most out of this book. Professional software development experience will also be beneficial to understand real-life business cases.

336 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2023

Reviews

[Michael Sypes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very well written and covers an extremely broad range of topics. However, it's difficult to tell what niche it fills. Very little prior knowledge is expected, and the author does a good job of explaining, step-by-step, each process in the journey. If you don't have most of that prior knowledge, are you really ready to learn Test-Driven Development? It can certainly be argued that's it's never too early to learn best practices, but this is ultimately pretty advanced stuff. I fear that the beginner will get bogged down in the details, and end end up blindly following the examples given without gaining the deeper insight into the primary topics, while an advanced programmer will be begging for more depth.
The book does a better job of presenting Behat and behavioral testing (BDD) than it does PHPUnit and TDD. (Some of the steps actually have you writing the tests after the code.) Like every other book I've read covering PHPUnit, a big issue is that it's a big jump from the simple tests presented to anything I've ever had to do in real-life live code.
Add a star if you're very new to the game. You'll certainly learn some good philosophical points on developing good software. If you don't know anything about these topics, this is a good place to get your feet wet before taking a deeper dive. If you're an advanced developer, there are likely better sources with more depth in the specific topics.