In a new post to his blog today Sebastian Bergmann looks at a way you can test your privates (no, not that) - private methods in your classes with PHPUnit. The key lies in the Reflection API.

One question I get over and over again when talking about Unit Testing is this: "How do I test the private attributes and methods of my objects?" [...] PHP 5.3.2 introduces the ReflectionMethod::setAccessible() method to allow the invocation of protected and private methods through the Reflection API.

This method lets you, at runtime, change the access level on the method away from private or protected and down to public so the contents can be executed normally. Though he warns one thing about doing it this way - just because you can, doesn't mean it's a good thing. You application is meant to be tested in a certain way and you should probably stick to that.