Now you could run [your] tests manually after each change by typing 'phpunit ', but we were looking for something a little more comfortable. We want to decrease the transactional cost of running the tests as much as possible to make the lives of our engineers more pleasant. Making testing easy is the only way the engineers will run the tests frequently.

Instead they opted for Watchr, a tool that keeps an eye on a list of files looking for a change. When one happens, a process is fired off - in this case a PHPUnit run. To make it even easier to see feedback, they integrated it with Growl to show pass or fail results. He includes the source for his Watchr script to help you get started.

Since I'm using PHPUnit more and more lately, especially in continuous testing sessions (sprints without hitting the continuous integration server), my dependence on a fast and more visual feedback loop rose. In this post I'll provide an easy solution that meets these requirements by utilizing PHPUnit's test listener feature.

He includes the code to attach the PHPUnit install to the Growl service via a custom listener that can give you a status of the tests from your most recent run (complete with color-coded feedback based on the results). With a few changes to the PHPUnit XML config file and link out to a script (stakeout.rb), he shows how to directly interface with Growl and includes a few screenshots on what the end result could look like.

I decided the best easiest route is to access the internal DBus API, however the forums and other resources on the Mumbles site'¦ well... just plain suck. And by suck I mean tell you that something exists and'¦ thaaats about it.

What he did find, thanks to Google, was a tool called D-Feet to help with debugging and a DBus extension for PHP that could add the needed support into his PHP installation. Following a bit of hacking and lots of testing, he was mostly successful. The only side effect is an Exception where the extension cannot correctly catch the Notify signal.