On DZone.com today there's an update about recent additions to Paratest, the parallel PHPUnit test runner (created by Brian Scaturro). He talks some about the benefits of running tests in parallel and shares some of the recent contributions to the project from other developers.

I've already written about my experiments with Paratest. Paratest is a PHPUnit wrapper that allows you to run tests written for PHPUnit in parallel, making us of multiple processes running on the same machine. In a world where cycle time is an important metric, trading resources to get the test suite to finish earlier is a net gain; especially when you're stepping on unstable stones and run the suite very often.

He (Giorgio Sironi) has contributed a new test runner to the project - the "WrapperRunner" that limits the number of processes spawned by the parallel testing tool. Another contribution came from Dimitris Baltas involving the addition of a TEST_TOKEN variable that can be used to uniquely identify each process as they're executing.

Raphael Stolt has put together a guide showing how you can link PHPUnit and its test status to the Growl engine on OS X to share the results in a move visual way (than just watching the test runner).

Since I'm using PHPUnit more and more lately, especially in continuous testing sessions (sprints without hitting the continuous integration server), my dependence on a fast and more visual feedback loop rose. In this post I'll provide an easy solution that meets these requirements by utilizing PHPUnit's test listener feature.

He includes the code to attach the PHPUnit install to the Growl service via a custom listener that can give you a status of the tests from your most recent run (complete with color-coded feedback based on the results). With a few changes to the PHPUnit XML config file and link out to a script (stakeout.rb), he shows how to directly interface with Growl and includes a few screenshots on what the end result could look like.

Raphael Stolt has a new post looking at a technique to ensure that your Phing buildfile is how it should be via unit testing it.

While transforming some of the Ant buildfile refactorings described in Julian Simpson's seminal essay into a Phing context, it felt plainly wrong that I didn't have any tests for the buildfile to back me up on obtaining the pristine behaviour throughout the process. While Ant users can rely on an Apache project called AntUnit there are currently no tailor-made tools available for testing or verifying Phing buildfiles.

He includes an sample build file that will be tested and some PHPUnit code to execute the build and run several tests on the results like githubCloneAdhocTaskShouldBeDefined, targetLogBuildShouldBeAPrivateOne, propertyGithubReposDirShouldBeSet and more.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted some details about an update that's been made to the test runner for the PHPUnit (3.3) unit testing suite - an allowance for directories instead of just files on the command line.

Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.

PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.

Sebastian Bergmann shows off a new feature of the latest PHPUnit release - the addition of ANSI colors to the runner's output.

Check out the screenshots here and here.

PHPunit is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted an official call for help for a PHPUnit-related project that seems to be a more and more requested feature for the popular unit testing package - an Ajax-based test runner.

It would be great if the frontend for the browser-based test runner would make use of AJAX. Since I am clueless when it comes to both web design in general and AJAX in particular, I would appreciate if someone else could help me with implementing this test runner.

He's looking for the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to put it all together as well as the Javascript that makes the magic happen. If you're interested in helping out, you can either contact him on the mailing list or in #phpunit on the Freenode IRC network.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted an official call for help for a PHPUnit-related project that seems to be a more and more requested feature for the popular unit testing package - an Ajax-based test runner.

It would be great if the frontend for the browser-based test runner would make use of AJAX. Since I am clueless when it comes to both web design in general and AJAX in particular, I would appreciate if someone else could help me with implementing this test runner.

He's looking for the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to put it all together as well as the Javascript that makes the magic happen. If you're interested in helping out, you can either contact him on the mailing list or in #phpunit on the Freenode IRC network.