Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

Chapter 11. Quality Assurance at studiVZ

Christiane Philipps and Max Horváth

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Acceptance testing

• Creating acceptance tests with Selenium

• Setting up studiVZ

• Best practices for acceptance testing

• Considerations for creating a Domain Specific Language

INTRODUCTION

"The software tests at studiVZ are complete, error-free, stable, and tremendously elegant." This is the legend we would love to tell you. studiVZ performs only rudimentary testing before we deploy new features; after all, we have millions of testers (that is, users). At least, this might be what outside observers with little insight into our work would say.

The truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly, not everything we do is perfect, but we invest lots of time, money, and effort to make our software a little better every day. studiVZ has a quality assurance team with up to 10 members, which is something that only a few web companies can afford. But we also are really busy with three platforms that deliver 13 billion page impressions to over 15 million members. Even with a team twice the size, we would certainly not be bored. Our features have to work, they must be easy to use, and they must be available with short loading time. Despite the application's high complexity, no side effects may occur, and performance is always an important topic for our server farm.

The privacy of our users and the required data protection are very sensitive topics, where any issue quickly leads to lots of public scrutiny. ...