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First released January 26, 2013
This blog post has first been published in the Qafoo blog and is duplicated here since I wrote it or participated in writing it.
Cover image for post PHPBNL: Testable Code & SOLID

PHPBNL: Testable Code & SOLID

2013-01-26

Tobias Schlitt, Benjamin Außenhofer

PHPBenelux was, as usual, the first conference of the year and, also as usual, it was a really great conference. As a 3rd "usual" thing, I did a tutorial and a talk there: On how to write Testable Code and to Make Your Project SOLID by applying these 5 fundamental principles of object oriented design to your code.

This weekend PHPBenelux took place in Antwerp, Belgium and Qafoo was part of this experience again. It is usually the first conference of the year and the organizers managed to create a remarkable event.

I did a tutorial together with Benjamin on Friday and a talk on Saturday. The topics were how to write Testable Code and to Make Your Project SOLID by applying these 5 fundamental principles of object oriented design to your code.

Testable CodeTestable Code

On Friday Benjamin and me gave a three hours workshop on Testable Code. To get people settled and connected to the topic we started with a dot sticking survey. As we realized that quite big fraction of attendees not having written tests with PHPUnit before, we inserted a short crash course offhand before starting with the real content.

After an introduction on reaons for testing your code and the typical approaches to this, we presented four of the most essential issues PHP developers have when approaching unit tests and showed how those can be fixed in the code.

Because practicing personally is a highly more effective way of learning than classroom style teaching is, the attendees paired in groups of two and put about 1.5 hours of work on a code kata after the lecturing. Of course three hours is a really short time to handle the topic exhaustively. To achieve that, a longer training on automated testing is needed. However, I had the impression that we gave the audience a good introduction into the topic, which can deal for further research and practice.

Make Your Project SOLID!Make Your Project SOLID!

My Make Your Project SOLID presentation, which I gave Saturday morning, was kinda related to this, since testability and good object oriented design go hand in hand. Raffling an ElePHPant to the attendee who finds the intentional fundamental issue in the presentation occasionally helped to keep people concentrated for a full hour. I was quite happy to see Anthony - advocator of SOLID principles himself - among the crowd and get positive feedback for the talk from him afterwards.

Although PHPBenelux is still running at the time of writing, I already want to thank the organizers of PHPBenelux for their great efforts for creating another awesome conference. It worked out really well once again. Also, I want to thank all of the attendees and speakers for creating the typical great atmosphere.