Chris Hartjes has a new post today looking at using test spies with Mockery, the alternative mocking framework to PHPUnit's own built-in functionality. Test spies are a feature that allows you to replace certain functions and methods of already created objects to help make mocking functionality easier.

While recording some screencasts I was struggling to figure out how to get PHPUnit’s built-in object mocking tools to allow me to create what is known as a “test spy”. I talk about them briefly in my PHPUnit Cookbook but I think that what I wanted to do in this instance was beyond what PHPUnit could give me.

He works through what he tried with the built-in PHPUnit mocking and found that it wasn't using the objects he provided as expected. He shifted over to Mockery and created a working version using the "shouldReceive" and "with" methods to handle the checks (spies) on the objects correctly.