Automate Your Automation

Ask just about any software engineer whether they think automated tests make a project easier and more enjoyable to work on, and you are likely to get aff resoundingly positive reply. Ask the same set of engineers what they think about setting up automation for their projects, though, and you are likely to get a wider variety of responses.

• It's tedious.
• It takes too long.
• It's expensive, and our clients don't want to pay for it.
• It's great -- once it's set up.

In the long term, automation will save on testing time and increase the reliability of releases. Getting to that sweet spot where the return on your time investment is in positive territory can seem far off when you are still standing on the starting line. For those who are working on a large number of projects, there may even be some question about whether the payoff will come through before the next project arrives, and you have to start all over again.

One of the great things about the various continuous integration services that are available is that the services themselves have an API that can be utilized to automate actions on your automation services. This presents an opportunity to ease repetitive tasks associated with starting new projects. In this session, we will examine how you can automate repetitive startup tasks to further streamline your workflow.

• Make or use a template project with starter tests, and clone it with a script.
• Configure authentication credentials in a testing service with a script.
• Create pull requests automatically within a script.
• Keep dependencies up-to-date using an automated service.

While there is no "silver bullet" that will simply set up and write all of your tests for you, the tools and techniques covered in this session can help you to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the time you spend on your project's automation. Attendees should have some familiarity with automation services, such as Circle CI, Travis, GitHub, BitBucket or similar. See Development Workflow Tools for Open-Source PHP Libraries for some examples.