Stefan Priebsch has posted an example of how he uses PHPUnit "manually" to reduce the overhead (and added complexity) of calling phing.

Instead of instantiating PHPUnit from phing, I use the command line interface to call PHPUnit. This decouples phing and PHPUnit, which should cause less problems with version updates in the future. To configure PHPUnit, phing creates a temporary XML configuration file which is deleted after PHPUnit has finished.

The source is included in the post - it manually builds the XML file needed for phing to do its job.

Wanting to automate a common task he found himself doing, Raphael Stolt came up with his own process and use Phing to help.

To round off an older article on this blog called "Using the PHP 5 reflection API to keep track of unsolved refactorings" I wanted to automate the following task: collect and log some information about developer marked unsolved refactorings for a single class file or more common multiple files of an whole directory. And as I'm getting more and more acquainted with Phing I wanted to craft this custom task by using it's provided extension possibilities.

He gives examples of what the "unsolvedRefactoring" notation looks, the XML mapping for its definition, and the code that actually makes the mapping work - and makes it easy to pull out the needed information. There's two versions presented, one a normal pull and the other modified slightly to "actually retrieve the metadata of the methods marked as improveable via the @unsolvedRefactoring doclet". And, finally, the integration with Phing comes, showing how to run the files and what the results should look like.