Sebastian Bergmann has posted about some updates in the latest version of the PHPUnit PHP unit testing tool (v4.8) and changes in code coverage handling.

PHPUnit 4.8 introduces a couple of small improvements. For instance, the @testWith annotation was added as "syntactic sugar" for defining data providers and the --no-coverage commandline option was added for ignoring any code coverage configuration from the configuration file.

PHP_CodeCoverage, the library used by PHPUnit to collect, process, and report code coverage information, has been updated for PHPUnit 4.8. It can now collect code coverage information on PHP 7 without the need for a third-party extension such as Xdebug. And PHP_CodeCoverage's HHVM driver has been updated to reflect changes to how HHVM provides code coverage information.

He gets into a bit more detail about the updates to both the PHP 7 handling and changes for HHVM, including how to call it for PHP 7 (phpdbg vs just the normal CLI) and how HHVM no exposes its coverage information publicly. This makes it simpler for PHPUnit to grab the data without special handling code. He also looks ahead to PHPUnit 5, scheduled for release in October 2015, and that some functionality will be deprecated when the version is changed.