You've started down the path of writing automated tests for your PHP code and are starting to get into the "red-green-refactor" cycle. Fewer bugs are making it into production and you're starting to appreciate the times when your test suite tells you that you've broken something you weren't expecting to break.

But this is just the beginning of the journey towards having confident deployments of well-tested, well-understood code. As more and more people start thinking about the software development process beyond "write some code and push it up!", tools have emerged that offer PHP developers a way to write code where the intent is clearer, the code itself is more consistent, and your test suite actually covers the testing scenarios you are expecting it to.

In "The Complementary PHP Testing Tools Cookbook" I'll show you how I use static code analysis, code linting, mutation testing, and continuous integration systems to take things one step further towards the goal of confident deployments of well-tested-and-understood code. PHP might be a big ball of nails that sticks to the internet, but that doesn't mean we can't have code that is confidently doing what we expect it to!