On the Laravel News site Tim MacDonald has written up a post sharing some tips on how you can speed up your PHPUnit tests, making them easier to run and more useful during the development process.

Having a fast test suite can be just as important as having a fast application. As a developer, getting feedback quickly about the state of your code allows for a much quicker development turnaround. Here we are going to run through some tips you can implement today to make your tests run faster.

The example test suites have been made intentionally slow to simulate a broader set of tests and also to emphasize the improvements possible. Your real-world mileage may vary.

He makes recommendations around the use of ParaTest to run the tests in parallel, re-running only failed tests, grouping slow tests, lowering the password hash "rounds" count and disabling XDebug. Each item in the list includes instructions on what changes need to be made and screenshots of the results of the change.