Sebastian Bergmann on ZendCon and PHPUnit 3

Sebastian Bergmann works at eZ systems. In his spare time he wrote and maintains the PHPUnit project. (He’s worked on other project but since that’s what he’s talking about at ZendCon, that’s what we’ll talk about) Sebastian will be speaking at ZendCon this year so I thought I’d run him down and get a feel for how things are going. As luck would have it, he contacted me before I had the chance to go find him. While I had him on IM, I asked him a couple of questions.

First, let’s lay the groundwork. Sebastian’s homepage gives this as his intro:

Sebastian Bergmann is a long-time contributor to various PHP projects, including PHP itself. He is currently working at eZ systems AS in Skien, Norway on the Workflow Management component for the eZ platform. As the developer of PHPUnit, he also helps with testing the eZ components. In his free time he likes to hack on Open Source software and to take photographs, preferably while traveling the world.

Sebastian, you are talking about PHPUnit at ZendCon.
Yes, I will be talking about PHPUnit. It is a tool that helps with testing PHP applications.

I know PHPUnit 3 is in BETA right now, as a matter of fact, you released BETA 2 just today. Can you tell us some of the new features of PHPUnit 3?
In a nutshell, PHPUnit 3 has two hallmark features: Mock Objects and improved reporting of Code Coverage. While the first helps with writing simpler tests for complex situations, the latter helps with analyzing the result of the tests and the test results.

Mock Objects sound very interesting. I can’t wait to try them out myself. I see from the PHPUnit web page that you have a full feature list published. I know you and I have talked before about this, my favorite of the new features has to be the integration with CruiseControl. Will your session at ZendCon be just on PHPUnit or will it be more general?
It will be an introductory talk to using PHPUnit and the concepts and processes that it supports. Along the way I will “show off” the new features. I still have hopes to release the final during ZendCon.

I’m just curious Sebastian, how did you get involved in testing? It’s not a subject many developers pay much attention to.
The topic of quality assurance in general and testing in particular sparked my interest while I was attending a Software Engineering lecture at University. This was around 2000 and it was the catalyst to start the PHPUnit project.

It sounds like a great session. I look forward to seeing you at ZendCon.

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