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)

Process must be respected


Rather than enforcing something called process on the team members, it is a good idea to get the team to define, agree, follow, and improve the process themselves. It is a fact that the software we develop with PHP is no longer simple. If we try to make the software over simplified, the chances are that the users might find the software we develop useless, and the users will loose the purpose of employing a team to develop the software. Therefore, the better approach is to understand the true complex nature of today's enterprise software and be prepared to deal with complexity.

Trying to be quick and overlooking details is short lived. A very heavy process where team members spend more time on non-real work also kills. The best is to have a process in place that the team is comfortable living with.

The element of the people factor in a process is critical to the success of the PHP project. The process is a set of activities, and the team members need to practice those...