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)

Making integration possible


It is the general feeling that integrating different modules developed by various team members is a technical issue. However, it is a technical issue as well as a collaboration issue. For example, say we discussed the PHP library for some functionality required by the project with a third party and we missed the point for discussing what version should be used. Two of the team members who need to use this library go ahead and use it for their part of the project. One team member uses an older version of the library that he had downloaded on his machine, not knowing that it is not the latest version, and the other one downloads the latest version and uses it. However, when it comes to the integration phase, the team realizes that two versions of the library have different APIs or bugs, and the two team members have used elements of the library that are not common to both the versions. Lots of time and energy is wasted, as not only some work needs to be discarded...