Best practices to test protected methods with PHPUnit
- by GrGr
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.
