Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

FOREWORD

Building and assuring quality software is not a new concept, and few will argue it is not important. I have had the privilege of building truly mission-critical operational software for many years—the kind where people's lives can be at stake. During that time, I learned lots about how to implement and drive a quality process from project inception to mission-critical use. Creating a high-quality process is not trivial, requires the support and commitment of the organization's leadership, and can impact choice of people, systems, processes, communications, and even organizational structures.

In my opinion, the challenges of the Internet's broad reach and pace dwarf the challenges of the mission-critical systems I was building. While many of these new systems are "only" business-critical, the truth is that they are no less critical and are dealing with additional layers of complexity such as more distributed development teams, well-known and evolving security attacks on web standards and software, internationalization challenges, shorter release cycles in SaaS settings, and more. In addition, in e-commerce applications, where downtime directly equates to money, the requirement for a strong quality-assurance program is even more critical and requires a special emphasis on compliance, quick time to fix (and time to verify and deploy that fix), and ability to run real-time end-to-end transactions to ensure not only that the application is up, but also that transactions can ...