Doctrine 2.0 Quality Assurance

Greetings folks!

Today I'd like to talk about Quality Assurance in PHP projects. Currently, PHP lacks good tools for QA, but thanks to a special PHP user, Sebastian Bergmann, this is changing gradually. If you don't know him, you can visit his blog and check about projects he's on. For lazy people, he's the author of PHPUnit, a de-facto Unit Test suite in PHP.

Doctrine 2.0 uses PHPUnit as our Unit Test suite. It relies on PEAR to be installed, but you can also install it via SVN.

The main initiative of QA in PHP projects is the website http://qualityassuranceinphpprojects.com. There you can find available tools to measure, for example, how complex is your project and possible semantical issues.

I have applied some of these tests against Doctrine 2.0 to see how complex it is and if it can be optimized more. The first test I run is a trace about how complex our code base is. The tool I used is phploc. Check out the results:

MacBlanco:bin guilhermeblanco$ ./phploc /Users/guilhermeblanco/www/doctrine/trunk/lib
phploc 1.1.1 by Sebastian Bergmann.

Directories:                               31
Files:                                    210

Lines of Code (LOC):                    38826
Comment Lines of Code (CLOC):           17004
Non-Comment Lines of Code (NCLOC):      21822

Interfaces:                                11
Classes:                                  229
Non-Static Methods:                      1699
Static Methods:                           106
Functions:                                 95

Of course it still misses a couple of code to implement (CLI Tasks, Locking strategies, ID Generators), but now we know how big Doctrine 2.0 is. Then, I decided to check duplicated code (possible optimization locations). The tool phpcpd gave me this feedback:

MacBlanco:bin guilhermeblanco$ ./phpcpd /Users/guilhermeblanco/www/doctrine/trunk/lib
phpcpd 1.1.1 by Sebastian Bergmann.

Found 1 exact clones with 15 duplicated lines in 2 files:

  - ./Doctrine/DBAL/Platforms/MsSqlPlatform.php:126-141
    ./Doctrine/DBAL/Platforms/MySqlPlatform.php:633-648

0.04% duplicated lines out of 38826 total lines of code.

I asked myself: It must be a method that could be moved to AbstractPlatform.php! So I opened both files and... no! It's a piece of code that cannot be optimized. So, consider Doctrine 2.0 extremely optimized, because there is no duplicated code internally!

Now Unit Test suite. Doctrine 2.0 has a steadily growing set of Unit Tests, and we are regularly analyzing the code coverage analysis to find parts that need more tests. Here is how such a coverage report is generated:

MacBlanco:tests guilhermeblanco$ phpunit --coverage-html=./_coverage Doctrine_Tests_AllTests
PHPUnit 3.3.17 by Sebastian Bergmann.

.....................................S.S....................  60 / 562
............................................................ 120 / 562
.....................................................SSSSSSS 180 / 562
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS............................................ 240 / 562
............................................................ 300 / 562
............................................................ 360 / 562
............................................................ 420 / 562
............................................................ 480 / 562
............................................................ 540 / 562
...SS.................

Time: 18 seconds

OK, but incomplete or skipped tests!
Tests: 562, Assertions: 1420, Skipped: 27.

Generating code coverage report, this may take a moment.

The generated coverage can be seen in the following picture.

Finally, some metrics are good to inspect how stable is our code. I applied pdepend, and it gave me these results:

The command I ran was:

MacBlanco:bin guilhermeblanco$ ./pdepend --summary-xml=/Users/guilhermeblanco/summary.xml --jdepend-chart=/Users/guilhermeblanco/jdepend.svg --overview-pyramid=/Users/guilhermeblanco/pyramid.svg /Users/guilhermeblanco/www/doctrine/trunk/lib

Here is the generated summary. If you have any other ideas/tools that we should apply in our codebase to generate other metrics, please drop us a message!