Heya, I’m just curious… what percentage of PHP projects actually go through benchmarking and testing phases before they are released out live?
I was reading Sitepoint’s PHP Master book on the parts of security, performance benchmarking and automated testing and I was really stumped.
I work in a tiny creative agency where I’m the solo coder who puts together the websites with some functionality (contact forms, simple CRUD operations with a database in 4-5 screen applications, and sometimes slightly larger systems involving 15-20 database tables) and I literally work on a shared web server without admin access to the PHP configuration or root access to my server… and the only “testing” I do is to go in and try to input all types erroneous data on all my forms.
Is this normal practice in the industry? Or should I really be getting my boss to give me more resources (time, manpower and servers!) so that I can really go and benchmark and optimize and do all that unit testing stuff?
As with all things its horses for courses, if your sites are low usage low profile then probably you can carry on as you are, they are doing the job, so to speak. If you start getting several million hits a day and have a high enough profile that people are gonna sling some mud in your direction then you’d need to start thinking of an upgrade in how you work and what security you build into these sites 
AS said numerous times, certain aspects of security should already be in your programming as a basic level, (injection attacks for example) if youre calling yourself a programmer. But the levels you go to depend on the size of the job and the importance of security within the project. Nobodys gonna spend weeks testing and verifying a €500 site.
Thanks much @Mandes - appreciate it.
Yes, most of the sites I put up are still pretty low profile… but then again I guess now would be the best time for me to go start learning about benchmarking and best practices for security 
Its never too early to start improving your skill set, and you usually then realise youve had it worong for all these years !!