I've already written about my experiments with Paratest. Paratest is a PHPUnit wrapper that allows you to run tests written for PHPUnit in parallel, making us of multiple processes running on the same machine. In a world where cycle time is an important metric, trading resources to get the test suite to finish earlier is a net gain; especially when you're stepping on unstable stones and run the suite very often.

He (Giorgio Sironi) has contributed a new test runner to the project - the "WrapperRunner" that limits the number of processes spawned by the parallel testing tool. Another contribution came from Dimitris Baltas involving the addition of a TEST_TOKEN variable that can be used to uniquely identify each process as they're executing.

Since I'm using PHPUnit more and more lately, especially in continuous testing sessions (sprints without hitting the continuous integration server), my dependence on a fast and more visual feedback loop rose. In this post I'll provide an easy solution that meets these requirements by utilizing PHPUnit's test listener feature.

He includes the code to attach the PHPUnit install to the Growl service via a custom listener that can give you a status of the tests from your most recent run (complete with color-coded feedback based on the results). With a few changes to the PHPUnit XML config file and link out to a script (stakeout.rb), he shows how to directly interface with Growl and includes a few screenshots on what the end result could look like.

While transforming some of the Ant buildfile refactorings described in Julian Simpson's seminal essay into a Phing context, it felt plainly wrong that I didn't have any tests for the buildfile to back me up on obtaining the pristine behaviour throughout the process. While Ant users can rely on an Apache project called AntUnit there are currently no tailor-made tools available for testing or verifying Phing buildfiles.

He includes an sample build file that will be tested and some PHPUnit code to execute the build and run several tests on the results like githubCloneAdhocTaskShouldBeDefined, targetLogBuildShouldBeAPrivateOne, propertyGithubReposDirShouldBeSet and more.

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.

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.

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.

It would be great if the frontend for the browser-based test runner would make use of AJAX. Since I am clueless when it comes to both web design in general and AJAX in particular, I would appreciate if someone else could help me with implementing this test runner.

He's looking for the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to put it all together as well as the Javascript that makes the magic happen. If you're interested in helping out, you can either contact him on the mailing list or in #phpunit on the Freenode IRC network.