In a recent post to the "PHP and Me" blog they look at how to type less $this in your PHPUnit tests using some handy tricks and a bit of custom code.

Lately I've been writing a few tests (using PHPUnit), and when you do there's one thing you end up doing a lot, which is typing $this-> whenever you need to do pretty much anything. It's not that bad (and PHP can be quite verbose itself) but it can become a bit of a bore I guess, especially after a while. [...] Those were valid points [about the global testing functions added to PHPUnit], and for a while that feature was even temporarily removed. So.. now what? Back to typing all those $this-> over & over again? Maybe not.

The post shows how to use the included functions to remove the "$this" in something like "$this->assertTrue()" or, to reduce things even more and not pollute the global namespace, a different approach by extending Assert. A few code examples are included as well as the class that extends the normal Assert functionality PHPUnit provides. It allows for the more flexible short-hand function calls to automatically be mapped back to their "more correct" versions.