While your focus should be on building great websites, there are tasks such as manual code testing and deployment that might not only be time-consuming but are normally considered menial and repetitive, and so it works well in the desire to be efficient to be able to automate these tasks.
So here are some tools that will assist in doing exactly that:
1. PHPUnit
This tool works very well especially for those who need to find an automated tool for accurate testing, as it is a vital process to the whole development cycle. Not only will this tool help you save time but detect errors that would take forever to iron out if done manually.
2. Phing
This tool is a highly customizable build system that is based on the Apache Ant system, and is effective when it comes to deployment tasks (and even entire procedures) which varies according to the environment that you are focusing on. Supported by all platforms, this tool can integrate with CVS and Subversion, manipulate the server file system and create PEAR packages from your custom libraries.
3. Git Hub
While using version control can be advantageous to managing source code in being able to experiment with various code branches and roll back unwanted changes and so on and so forth. This open source version control tool (GitHub) can be a big advantage amongst several developers.
4. FirePHP
You can use FirePHP (which employs the Firefox add-on Firebug) to review PHP errors and other analytical data.
5. XDebug
This is another testing tools except while PHPUnit catches mistakes after the code has been written, this tool (XDebug) helps you determine the cause of these problems while also providing utilities for reviewing object contents, tracing execution and so on and so forth.