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)

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed the need for a software process model for a PHP project. With a powerful yet simple programming language like PHP, the usual temptation is to overlook the need of a process. However, the increasing complexity of the PHP applications demand a systematic approach from start to end of PHP team projects nowadays.

Though it is seemingly difficult to define a process and get the team to follow that process, as it was discussed in this chapter, it is quite possible to implement a working process model and get the team to follow that. The secret of success is to get the team involved and let the team members themselves understand the need of a process. Start simple and improve as required and consciously evaluate where we are in terms of our process and identify where we want to go. A simple measure, such as the number of bugs, their frequency, and the nature of those, would reveal where we are in terms of the process. Reducing the number and frequency of the...