PHPUnit vs. Python vs. TestNG vs. Xdebug Comparison Chart

PHPUnit requires the dom and json extensions, which are normally enabled by default. PHPUnit also requires the pcre, reflection, and spl extensions. These standard extensions are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without patching PHP’s build system and/or C sources. The code coverage report feature requires the Xdebug (2.7.0 or later) and tokenizer extensions. Generating XML reports requires the xmlwriter extension. Unit Tests are primarily written as a good practice to help developers identify and fix bugs, to refactor code and to serve as documentation for a unit of software under test. To achieve these benefits, unit tests ideally should cover all the possible paths in a program. One unit test usually covers one specific path in one function or method. However a test method is not necessarily an encapsulated, independent entity. Often there are implicit dependencies between test methods, hidden in the implementation scenario of a test.

TestNG is a testing framework inspired from JUnit and NUnit but introducing some new functionalities that make it more powerful and easier to use, such as annotations, or the possibility to run your tests in arbitrarily big thread pools with various policies available (all methods in their own thread, one thread per test class, etc.). You can test that your code is multithread safe, there is flexible test configuration, support for data-driven testing (with @DataProvider), support for parameters, powerful execution model (no more TestSuite). There is a supported by a variety of tools and plug-ins (Eclipse, IDEA, Maven, etc.), it also embeds BeanShell for further flexibility, and there is default JDK functions for runtime and logging (no dependencies), and dependent methods for application server testing. TestNG is designed to cover all categories of tests, unit, functional, end-to-end, integration, etc.