In one of his latest entries, Sebastian Bergmann answers a question from another blogger about the future of software metrics and project mess detection as a part of the PHPUnit project.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.

Sebastian Bergmann spotlights another feature of the upcoming PHPUnit version 3.2 - the inclusion of a Project Mess Detector's ability to help find duplicate code.

Duplicate code can be hard to find, especially in a large project. Johann-Peter Hartmann of MAYFLOWER GmbH recently implemented Copy & Paste Detection for PHPUnit's growing set of features that extends its usage scenarios beyond "just unit testing" to a one-stop solution for quality assurance in PHP-based projects.

In his example, Sebastian shows what the response will look like when the tests find duplicate code - giving details like the files involved and the code fragment that was duplicated.

Check out this list in another post on Sebastian's blog for more of the metrics that will be included in the upcoming version.