Silvan Muhlemann has posted about the unit testing that tillate.com does for their releases - the whole process from start to finish.

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I'd like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests.

He talks about their choice of SimpleTest, their test monitoring, CruiseControl and their "if it doesn't pass, you can't release it" mentality to keep their site as bug free as possible.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted some details about an update that's been made to the test runner for the PHPUnit (3.3) unit testing suite - an allowance for directories instead of just files on the command line.

Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.

PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.

Sebastian Bergmann shows off a new feature of the latest PHPUnit release - the addition of ANSI colors to the runner's output.

Check out the screenshots here and here.

PHPunit is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a quick example of how to use the PHPUnit unit testing suite for PHP to create code for you (assuming you're using the test first method of development.

His example builds the class off of a set of test for a "BowlingGame" that ends up with roll() and score() methods based off of the naming conventions used in the test:

Following the convention that the tests for a class BowlingGame (see below) are written in a class named BowlingGameTest (see above), the test case class' source is searched for variables that reference objects of the BowlingGame class and analyzing what methods are called on these objects.

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.

Frank Kleine has announced on the Stubbles blog that the latest version of the framework, Stubbles 0.5.0 has been released.

A last day of a month - time to release a new Stubbles version. The release does not feature that much new features, we focused mainly on infrastructure and code quality improvements. The most important change of course is the change of the package separator.

Instead of the dots they've gone with the more standard double-colon that PHP already uses. There were also code quality improvements and a move away from SimpleTest out to the popular PHPUnit unit testing package.

You can download this new package from the Stubbles project site.

Sebastian Bergmann has officially announced the creation of a new planet in the PHP community - one specifically for the PHPUnit testing suite - Planet PHPUnit.

At the moment only three feeds are aggregated on Planet PHPUnit: release announcements, articles about new features in PHPUnit written by myself, and Manuel Pichler's blog postings on phpUnderControl.

He also is requesting that anyone out there currently writing on any topics surrounding the popular unit testing framework send him an email letting him know where it's at.