php[architect]: Testing Strategy With the Help of Static Analysis

php[architect] magazine has shared another article from their April 2018 issue on their site. In this article Ondrej Mirtes covers the use of static analysis to help testing and inform you of type safety issues.

When developing an application, our aim as software developers is to make sure it does what it ought to do and to keep the number of defects as low as possible. [...] In this article, I’d like to introduce you to the concept of type safety and how it can improve the reliability and stability of your code. Once your code is more type-safe, and that fact is verified by automated tools, you can cherry-pick which parts of your application need extensive unit tests and where you can rely just on well-defined types.

He starts off by talking about types (strict and dynamic) in PHP and the current state of the typing system for variable values. He covers the role of good type hinting in method and function definitions and how it can help IDEs like PhpStorm locate issues. He also talks about how type hints can provide you feedback on the design of the application and some of the tools that can help you find issues.

He wraps up the article with some tips for making your code more strongly typed and a look at what kind of tests are needed to help ensure these types remain enforced.