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)

Team work is challenging


It is challenging to work with a team. Putting together some smart people in a room will not deliver the results that we wish. The team members need to work with each other and organize themselves together for the team to operate as a single unit.

When a number of people are working together in a team, there can be situations where some people will need to work on the same component. Especially with pair programming, not only the pairs switch, but the components can also switch. Sub-components, that is, the independent parts of the same component, will be assigned to different members in the team to ensure parallelism to shorten the iteration lifetime. Thus, collaboration is a must.

Team members make assumptions

When team members are working on the PHP code, they might happen to make their own assumptions about what others are doing and what others might do. These assumptions are made unconsciously and team members will not even think of them as assumptions at times...