Book Image

PHP Team Development

By : Samisa Abeysinghe
Book Image

PHP Team Development

By: Samisa Abeysinghe

Overview of this book

Given the nature of the business environment today, organizations that want to build value-added enterprise PHP applications need a team of PHP people rather than an individual. You've got a team! What next? Customizing such applications to meet with organizational objectives and maintaining these applications over time can be quite a tedious task for your team with so many people involved. In this book, you will explore how you can break up complex PHP projects into simple sub-parts that multiple team members can work on. The book highlights the use of the MVC pattern for separating concerns in the application and agile principles to deliver code that works. You will learn to blend the simplicity and power of PHP with evolving software engineering principles and tools to easily develop code that is easy to maintain. With this book in hand, you know how to avoid getting muddled up while working in a team and achieve success on your project with effective team work. Organizations choose PHP as the preferred language for complex web applications because it is battle tested, hardened over time, and proven to work. Thus, chances of the software project you are involved with being PHP-based, are very high. Soon, you will need to explore the technical as well as non-technical aspects that are important to achieve success in PHP team projects of this kind. This book starts by explaining the need for teams working on complex software projects. You learn how you can divide the complexity of PHP projects with the help of the MVC pattern and the use of frameworks. It then discusses the need for a process and how you can choose the right process. It teaches you how to use agile principles to deliver working software for customers, and how to make sure that the team collaborates effectively. Towards the end, the book emphasizes continuous improvement in process and product as well as the people involved. You learn how to ensure that your team is open to change and user feedback, and has the right mindset about quality and other project-related aspects.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

KISS—beyond frameworks


Using a PHP framework, we can delegate the complexity of dealing with the flow of control. In the section above, we discussed in detail what to look for when selecting a framework, what to expect out of a framework, and how we should organize our team to get the maximum use out of the framework.

Most of the concepts we discussed with respect to the PHP frameworks can be generalized to any tool or library that we plan to use for our PHP project. For example, we always need to look into the documentation, samples, and community support of any piece of software that we are going to use for the project, because the team members working on the project need technical support. Based on the budget available, the project management might even decide to look for commercial support. Also, the company lawyers are interested in the kind of license under which the libraries that we are going to use.

Beyond frameworks

We know for sure that frameworks will help us simplify our projects...