Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann has a new post today about a different sort of use for the PHPUnit testing software - a "Project Mess Detector".

As of version 3.2, PHPUnit will not only be able to calculate and collect a variety of software metrics. It will also be able to report violations of rules that are based on these metrics in PMD's XML format. This information can then be fed to any tool that integrates with PMD.

The Project Mess Detector (PMD) software scans code and looks for potential problems. Having this integrated with PHPUnit means one less piece of software to run and the potential for even better written code.

In a update to his recent post on Cyclomatic Complexity in PHPUnit, Sebastian Bergmann has given more information about the software metrics support that the upcoming release (3.1.6) of PHPUnit will offer.

The upcoming 3.1.6 release of PHPUnit adds a couple of software metrics to the data that is stored in PHPUnit's test database.

Among the metrics gathered are things like: lines of code, commented lines of code, an attribute inheritance factor, depth of inheritance tree, method hiding factor and a polymorphism factor (he links each of these more complex ones for more information on the subject). Still included in the post is an example of the output for the Cyclomatic Complexity metric.