Testing should be considered as equal the development process. Each step during an engineers programming activity has a corresponding testing activity. While each logical module adds to the growth of the software, these parts and integrations must be tested in different ways, following different approaches. The first part of the “Testing Life Cycle” series covers component and integration tests. more »

As software development techniques have advanced during the last decades, some basic principles of testing have also been established. Describing theoretical ideas and practical hints, these principles can be seen as a basic guideline for both, testing and coding. more »

Error handling is one of programmings most important issues. It makes your programm stable and prevents it from an inconsistant state. Error checking and handling always boosts your lines of code. So if it has to be this was, how might a convenient strategy for this look like? more »

PHP5 new OOP features now allow programmers to create a real object and class based application. But there is one limitation that complicates this development: web based applications rely on a request-response cycle and unlike JSP, PHP does not keep object states between different requests (not talking about hack solutions including sessions or special server extensions). The result is, that objects must be initialized and restored everytime they are needed (maybe based on data stored via GET or POST). So, PHP does not really seem appropriate for developing real OOP applications, beside the use in code libraries. more »

While reading a book about Unit Testing I got caught on a small chapter about Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is one of the most significant aspects in Extreme Programming and it’s core concept can be stated as “test twice, code once”. more »