This is the Zendcon 2013 version. At one point in time, I was the technical lead on two different projects. One was an application we were purchasing from a vendor that was being written in Java (and had previously been written in .NET by another vendor, who then switched to Java, and then abandoned the project), and one was being built in-house with PHP on the IBM i. They were the same product for two different product lines that we offered, but time constraints forced us to build two products in tandem. In the end, the PHP application was completed and delivered to end-users in about 7 months from start to finish, while the former project languished. We'll compare the two projects in the tools and technologies that were used to integrated with the IBM i backend as well as programming.

1. A Tale of Two
Apps
WHY DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES MATTER
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2. Who Am I?
 Chris Tankersley
 Been Doing PHP for 9+ Years
 Lots of projects no one uses, and
a few that some do:
 https://github.com/dragonmant
ank
 Worked in insurance for 4.5 years
 I know RPG!
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3. What did we need to do?
“Build an app for agents to quote and
issues new policies online, print ID
cards, and policy documents, and all the
fun stuff associated with that.”
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* „Fun Stuff‟ was subjective

4. We had this… kinda
 Backend iSeries vendor supplied a „solution‟ for
our Personal Auto policies
 Only worked with Personal Auto
 After many years, support was dropped
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5. What did we have? 5

6. We needed a solution
 We needed something that worked with our
existing backend, which had all of our raters and
business logic. We didn‟t want to switch
processing systems.
 Turns out we had two things – a web app and a
“RESTful” interface to the iSeries. The interface
used ACORD XML, which is a standard XML
schema. We could replace the web app with a
new one that understood ACORD!
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7. What we decided to do
 Build one!
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8. What we decided to do
 Build one!
 Purchase one!
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We went with a vendor with a pedigree in insurance. They had a
Tomcat+Postgres solution, and since the magical black box talked
XML, they were confident they could swap out their rating system with
theirs. We‟d be done in 6 months.

9. Their Solution 9
More on them later though

10. We finally build our own!
We needed to bring our commercial business online to
help sell it. We had the technology (but not $6 million)
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11. Our Solution 11

12. Why Two Solutions?
Notice how I said that the Tomcat/Postgres app would
be done in 6 months?
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Yeah…
The app took much more time and budget than originally thought.
How did we do a PHP app in 7 months and much less money?

13. What was different?
 Proper specifications
 Development Lifecycle
 Understanding your stack
 Testing and QA
 Deployment Practices
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14. Proper Specifications
 Functional and technical specifications are a
must. If you don‟t know what you are
building, how will you know how to build it? Or
when it‟s finished?
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15. There is a difference
between this
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16. And This 16

17. Development Lifecycle
 Waterfall
 Spiral/Prototype
 Agile (SCRUM, Kanban, etc)
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18. They used Waterfall 18

19. We used Agile-ish-stuff 19

20. Understanding Your Stack
 If you don‟t know how your stack works, it makes it
really hard to figure out problems with things go
belly up.
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21. Their Stack 21

22. Our Stack 22

23. Testing and QA
 You do test your code, right?
 How do you prove your code works?
 Can anyone run your tests or are they only
accessible to certain people?
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24. They used only “HP
Functional Testing”
 As the name implies, it just did functional testing.
In the end, it was a very expensive Selenium.
 While they wrote in Java, they did not use (nor
understand why anyone would use) JUnit or other
unit testing frameworks.
 Because it was cost prohibitive, we could not run
tests.
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25. We used standard PHP
tools
 PHPUnit
 We settled on PHPUnit for unit testing. It was/is
widely documented and we even managed to get
it to run on the iSeries.
 Selenium
 We manually ran these tests as we hadn‟t worked
out how to get it to run headless. Not a big deal
because we had to support IE, which only
supported manually running it anyway.
 phpUnderControl
 This ran PHPUnit automatically for us and built our
documentation
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26. Unit Testing Works!
 Using unit testing and continuous integration, we
were able to detect test failures right away. Being
able to run PHPUnit on the iSeries helped us
identify and fix platform-specific bugs. Since
developers could run PHPUnit and Selenium
locally, we had less regressions.
 Since HP Functional Testing was expensive, only
the vendor could run the functional tests so
developers (even at the vendor) never knew
when the tests broke. Since it was only
functional, it didn‟t find subtle bugs in the code.
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27. Deployment Practices
 Continuous Integration Tools (Jenkins, xinc/phing)
 Build file with manual deployment
 Custom deployment script
 Hope and a Prayer
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28. We went the custom route
1. Tagged trunk in SVN
2. Script checked out the build, SCP‟d it to the
iSeries
3. MySQL Updates were applied by the script
This worked pretty well considering we could tag a
revision in SVN that passed tests, which we could
check via phpUnderControl.
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29. They went with the last
option
1. The code on the dev server was packaged as a
WAR file
2. The SQL needed for the upgrade was put into a file
1. Sometimes multiple SQL files that would need to be run
in order
3. A zip file was created from this
4. It was e-mailed to us
5. We put the WAR file into place and ran the SQL files
manually against Postgres
6. Tomcat was restarted
tl;dr: Stuff blew up regularly
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30. Putting it all together
 Auto Quoter
 Originally 6 months to production and small price
tag. Ended up being way over budget and way
over time. When I left, it had just barely gotten to
where v1 had originally been. This was due to poor
specs, poor QA, and poor development practices.
 Artisan Quoter
 We ended up 1 month over time, but much
cheaper (even when payroll was considered). It ran
on existing hardware, so the software cost only
ended up being Zend Server.
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31. Questions? 31

32. Thank You!
 chris@ctankersley.com
 @dragonmantank
 https://joind.in/9070
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