Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality. Technical debt is created when maintainability isn't a purposeful focus of the developer. Future changes and debugging become costly, due to a lack of unit testing and structure. Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability - and save you time.

There's a few concepts they cover in the tutorial including DRY (don't repeat yourself), working with dependency injection and actually writing the tests with PHPUnit. They start with a bit of code that needs some work and use the tests to help refactor it into something that can be easily mocked (using Mockery).

Of course, the advantages of object-orientation can only be fully exploited when implemented in conjunction with best practices such as encapsulation and inheritance. One such "implementational" best practice is dependency injection, a design pattern that facilitates the decoupling of otherwise dependent components. [...] Save yourself the trouble and decouple components using dependency injection.

He gives an example of how a simple dependency injection (DI) method on an "Account" class to take the database connection dependency out of the actual class and into an encapsulated object. This way, any sort of standardized database object can be passed in and acted upon. He also mentions two dependency injection containers you could use to help you implement it - Symfony's and Pimple.

Qualifications:

• Strong understanding of XHTML, CSS, and standards-based design
• Object Oriented Programming experience and familiarity with testing
• Knowledge of key differences between PHP 4 and 5
• Some experience with XML and web services
• Familiarity with MySQL and be able to write SQL queries
• Understanding of source control including branching and tagging
• Working knowledge of the UNIX shell and configuring Apache with PHP
• Strong work ethnic, be a team player, and have excellent reference

You can get complete details on her talk and on the conference from the official New York PHP Conference website, including saving your place at the conference by registering.