Zoe Slattery has posted an update about the TestFest events happening around the world and the contributions they've been making to the overall cause of getting PHP code coverage as complete as possible.

Groups from all over the world have contributed 554 new tests for PHP since April 1st 2009. Of these, 327 have already been moved into PHP's CVS (thanks Felipe!). The results of running tests on a Linux 32 bit platform can be seen here (sorry about the colour scheme), the user groups who have contributed are also listed. We also run the tests on a 64 bit Linux platform here, but this only runs PHP5.3 and PHP5.2.

She's also run some complete code coverage tests (after fighting a bit with ccache and lcov) and came up with a two percent increase overall (including a huge jump in the ext/ldap extension's coverage from about nine percent up to almost ninety percent!)

Lorna Mitchell has posted about her own experiences at her local TestFest as hosted by the PHP North West group in Manchester.

Yesterday saw the PHP North West User Group hold their first Test Fest in Manchester. As a relatively young user group (at less than a year old) with not a single @php.net email address between us, this was an ambitious venture. Scott MacVicar very kindly offered to come and be our mentor - to show us around PHP and get us started writing tests, and in fact he did very well and everyone was able to begin quite quickly.

She mentions the fourteen attendees, eighty-four tests created and the encouragement it gave for those developers to write even more. You can see photos taken at the event here.

Christian Weiske has posted about his experience at this year's TestFest in Belin (as hosted by the Berlin PHP User Group).

I spent the last weekend (may 09/10) on the PHP Testfest Berlin, organized by Till for the Berlin PHP Usergroup. Coming from Leipzig, I don't really know who of the other 8 people were from the user group and who not.

He mentions issues the group faced (OS X being difficult, PHP from CVS not compiling), the intro to testing and their first area of choice - gettext (which they got up to 98.8% coverage!). The second and third efforts were some work done on the intl and sockets extensions.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted some of his experiences at this year's TestFest organized by the PHPBelgium group.

We decided to test the SQLite3 extension, and we also had two people writing tests for LDAP. With a nice end result of 24 tests written for SQLite3 and 9 for LDAP, we are very pleased with the result since only 9 people attended our event. Our mentor Felix De Vliegher had given us a very clear instructions and apparently most attendees already had seen my (and other people's) slides on slideshare.net. See the pictures of those great moments on flicr.com.

You can check out some of the impact that they and other TestFesters made this past weekend in the PHP 5.3 code coverage report.

Zoe Slattery has posted some about how the TestFest effort is going this year and what the response has been from the PHP community in general.

It feels like a long time since we started on this road in February 2009. So much has happened since then ... and now we are two days away from the 9th May when several European groups will run events. We have 22 groups registered in all, Munich and Quebec have already run successful events. [...] It's great to see user groups helping out with PHP development in this way - I'm just amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and talent of PHP users.

She takes a second to thank sponsors - including Microsoft and Ibuildings (including their swag). The event will last through the end of June and test numbers will be calculated and evaluated for inclusion quickly after. You can get an idea of the current testing runs here.

On the IBuildings blog there's a new post by Soila Patajoki taking a brief look at TestFest events around the world.

The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.

She points out some of the European TestFest events that Ibuildings is helping out with including ones in London, Manchester and Belgium. You can find out more about TestFest-ing and see if there's a group in your area participating on the TestFest page off the main PHP QA site.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted a few reasons why he thinks you should attend and participate in your local TestFest event.

As I wrote earlier, several TestFest events will be held soon with the biggest one being the European TestFest initiative of quite a big bunch of European usergroups. But why should you attend such a TestFest?

Here's his four reasons:

• To improve PHP
• Improve your own knowledge
• To expand your network
• Because you're friggin cool!

You can find out more about TestFests in your area at this page on PHP's QA website.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell talks a bit about the upcoming TestFest event happening in Manchester next weekend and what she's learned about testing PHP to make things flow a bit smoother for her while there (and you, should you want to write tests in the future).

In preparation I decided it was high time to sit down and figure out what testing PHP is all about. People kept telling me it was easy but I had no clear picture of how all the pieces went together - there are different ways of doing the same thing and although I have been keen to get involved with testing for some time, I haven't been able to get started until now.

She looks at the automated tests as a part of the build ("make test") and some of the screens from the lcov testing results. She also recommends reading up on the phpt documentation to help you get going.

In a recent blog post Stefan Koopmanschap reminds the PHP development community that the PHP TestFest is back again this year!

Last year's TestFest was a huge success. The worldwide initiatives by usergroups and individuals gave a nice addition to the code coverage for PHP itself. This year, the TestFest period has been extended to 3 months, starting the beginning of this month and ending end of june. But a nice bunch of European usergroups including the Dutch usergroup are combining TestFest on may 9th!

TestFest events are happening all over the world - you can see if there's one near you on this page of the PHP.net wiki. For those attending php|tek this year, there'll also be a TestFest going on during the Hackathon event (read our interview about the event here).

Pierre has put a call out for PHP developers who would like to participate in a TestFest event to be held in Munich (and southern Germany).

Johannes and I are trying to organize one or more TestFest days. No PHP internal knowledge is required (like C knowledges), all you need is willing to help to improve PHP and a good mood.

If you'd like to participate, contact either Pierre (pierre at php dot net) or Johannes (johannes on php dot net) and they'll get in touch. If you're wondering what the TestFest is all about, checj out this page off the main PHP.net site for more information.