Hello,

I found the discussion on Do you test private method informative.

I have decided, that in some classes, I want to have protected methods, but test them. Some of these methods are static and short. Because most of the public methods make use of them, I will probably be able to safely remove the tests later. But for starting with a TDD approach and avoid debugging, I really want to test them.

I thought of the following:

• Method Object as adviced in an answer seems to be overkill for this.
• Start with public methods and when code coverage is given by higher level tests, turn them protected and remove the tests.
• Inherit a class with a testable interface making protected methods public

Which is best practice? Is there anything else?

It seems, that JUnit automatically changes protected methods to be public, but I did not have a deeper look at it. PHP does not allow this via reflection.