Chris Hartjes has a post on his site sharing a video from a presentation he gave about "metatesting" to a local PHP user group:

Yesterday I gave a short talk at GPUG about a topic I've dubbed "metatesting". Borrowing the phrase from a children's card game I wanted to talk about the state of testing and associated tools.

You can watch the presentation through the in-page video player including both the slides and Chris' presentation of them. In it he talks about mature testing tools (and extending them rather than creating new ones), open source projects and their tests or lack thereof, how testing reduces the cost of bugfixing and much more. Check out the full presentation for some great tips and updates on where software (and PHP) testing is today.

Chris Hartjes has had a few posts about "metatesting" already and in this latest article he takes the series one more step. He looks at moving outside of the current toolset and expanding on them to meet your testing needs.

While PHPUnit is awesome out of the box, it still lacks some tools that are required to do things like test protected class methods or assign values to protected class attributes. Lucky for me we have an awesome testing engineer at Kaplan named Will Parker who has shown me some ways that they have extended PHPUnit itself to make testing certain things easier.

Chris talks about things like testing protected methods (easy thanks to a helper) and checking the value of a class property. The key to both of them lies in using PHP's own Reflection functionality to alter properties on the class objects themselves.