Category: Good practices

Shotgun surgery: How to avoid it and achieve safety and high productivity

Imagine an engineer tasked with updating a feature who makes changes across the entire codebase without a clear plan or structure. Instead of committing small, focused updates, they introduce a massive set of changes at once, touching numerous files and modules. Without TDD or incremental commits, tracking all these modifications becomes overwhelming, making even simple tasks like code reviews or context switching costly and confusing. This disorganized approach, known as shotgun surgery, increases the likelihood of bugs and errors, making the code harder to maintain. In this article, we’ll explore how to avoid this pitfall and improve both productivity and code safety.

Unit testing tips by examples in PHP

In these times, the benefits of writing unit tests are huge. I think that most of the recently started projects contain any unit tests. In enterprise applications with a lot of business logic, unit tests are the most important tests, because they are fast and can us instantly assure that our implementation is correct. However, I often see a problem with good tests in projects, though these tests’ benefits are only huge when you have good unit tests. So in these examples, I will try to share some tips on what to do to write good unit tests.

Mutation testing – we are testing tests

Writing tests should assure us that the code created by us is working correctly. Often we point out the code coverage factor and if we have 100% we can say that implemented solutions are correct. Are you sure? Maybe there is a tool that can give us more accurate feedback?

Entity should always be valid

Very often in projects using Doctrine, in entity there are mapping for fields also for each field there are getters and setters. In addition, for each field, we have validation annotations, and forms are validating on the entity. Is this the right approach?

Active record (Eloquent) vs Data mapper (Doctrine)

In the most of systems need to save data somewhere and in some way. ORM (Object-Relational Mapping), is the way of mapping the system to the database. ORM is the layer between database and application which deals with creating, updating, reading and deleting.

Service locator vs Dependency injection

During designing application, we are making new classes. Classes have dependencies. In programming we distinguish two patterns for managing class’s dependencies:

Dependency injection
Service locator