Raphael Stolt has written up a post for his blog talking about custom PHPUnit assertions and a simple method to create them.

In this blog post I'd like to set the focus on some of the aspects of the Custom Assertion pattern, by showing how to create custom PHPUnit assertions, which attacks the above mentioned smell [of bad test code] and its retroactive effects with a huge antiperspirant flagon, while also providing the chance to build a customer friendly and domain related test vocabulary.

His first assertion is simple, checking the contents of a bag object to be sure that there are no duplicate items and that its content count is reduced by one if something is removed. Then, he moves on to making the custom assertion for his "IdShouldFollowAgreedConvention" test. He explains how to use the assertion class and how it all fits together in the final, functional test case.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted an addition to his previous look at exceptions in CakePHP with a modification that uses assertions instead of an if to check the value of a variable.

I suddenly remembered what assertions are and how they could make my code more readable, while making it shorter. I took a quick look at PHP's assert function, but decided that I don't like it. [...] What I ended up doing was basically to create a class called Assert, and abuse it as a name-space for a whole bunch of useful assertion functions.

He includes two examples of how this new class would look, checking to see if a value is empty and to see if a task ID exists in a given value. The code for the assertion class is also included and has methods for checking things like "not empty", "equals to", "is not numeric" and "is an object". And, no, it's not CakePHP specific, so you could take it an use it anywhere.

On the SitePoint PHP blog, there's a new post from Paul Annesley about his latest creation - a nine line unit tester for PHP, pTest.

I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn't have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. [...] I didn't need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick.

He includes the code (of course) and an example of it in action, three tests with their assertions. It's a simple little tool made of a simple purpose, a starting place for developers just learning unit testing to learn from.