Nick Belhomme has recently announced on his blog that he is releasing the first few pages of his PHPUnit training course. Click on in, I think I’ve got a quote and a URL around here somewhere.

Unit testing is becoming a fairly common element of software projects because of its promise of providing better quality to the code base. A unit test is a class or method that exercises your code for purposes of verifying that it functions correctly. During the course of your project, these tests remain as artifacts that can be used over and over again to verify that your code is always working correctly. The higher percentage of your production code you exercise, the higher degree of certainty you can have that your code is doing what it was designed to do.

On the Xebee blog there’s a recent post looking at test-driven development with the Zend Framework and PHPUnit. They show how they work well together and make it simpler to use TTD to create and test your applications.

In his latest post on Content with Style, Pascal Opitz is writing about his approach to unit-testing Controllers in a Zend Framework MVC application.

A.J.Brown has published the first of a two-part series explaining how to write automated unit tests for Zend Framework applications. His article, which makes use of PHPUnit and Zend_Test in the context of a user account controller, also discusses creating seed data, setting authentication state and writing test cases.

Federico Cargnelutti has written a blog post about testing Zend Framework controllers using the PHPUnit unit testing framework (v3.3.9 of which was just released). His post includes step-by-step instructions for creating your own unit tests, combining them into test suites, and running them under PHPUnit. Essential reading for anyone serious about ZF development!

p. Stefan Koopmanschap just twittered and blogged that the Dutch PHP TestFest 2008 has been announced. (Annocunement is in Dutch, insert Babelfish to continue)

A short time ago, I wrote an article for Devzone entitled “An Introduction to the Art of Unit Testing in PHP” which explained why testing, and especially automated testing, is an important aspect of developing in any programming language. I also offered a brief example of applying a design methodology called Test-Driven Development, which demonstrated that writing tests before code led to improved simpler design free of bugs.

p. Yossi Leon has written an interesting post over on blogs.zend.com (did you know we had a blogs.zend.com?) on Zend Studio for Eclipse. If you’ve been following this project then you’ll want to take a look at Yossi’s latest post.

Testing is an essential aspect of developing in any programming language. If you don’t test your source code then how can you verify it works as expected? Manual testing can only be performed irregularly and usually only in limited ways. The answer to testing source code regularly, and in depth, is to write automated tests which can be frequently executed. In PHP such tests are usually written using a unit testing framework, a framework which allows the source code of any application or library to be tested as isolated units of functionality such as a single class or method. As unit testing has gained popularity, it has become a standard practice in PHP with libraries and frameworks such as Swiftmailer, the Zend Framework and Symfony all requiring unit test coverage of their source code.