I just want to point out one thing. Let's forget about private fields for a moment and focus on what client of your class cares about. Your class exposes a contract, in this case - ability to alter and retrieve name (via getter and setter). Expected functionality is simple:

• when I set name with setName to "Gerald", I expect to get "Gerald" when I call getName

That's all. Client won't (well, shouldn't!) care about internal implementation. Whether you used private field name, hashset or called web service via dynamically generated code - doesn't matter for client. The bug you are currently experiencing, from user point of view - is not a bug at all.

Whether PHPUnit allows you to test private variables - I don't know. But from unit-testing perspective, you shouldn't do that.

Edit (in response to comment):

I understand your concerns about possible exposure of internal state, however I don't think unit testing is the right tool to deal with that. You can come up with a lot of possible scenarios how something might do something else which wasn't planned. Unit tests are by no means cure for all and shouldn't be use as such.

I just want to point out one thing. Let's forget about private fields for a moment and focus on what client of your class cares about. Your class exposes a contract, in this case - ability to alter and retrieve name (via getter and setter). Expected functionality is simple:

• when I set name with setName to "Gerald", I expect to get "Gerald" when I call getName

That's all. Client won't (well, shouldn't!) care about internal implementation. Whether you used private field name, hashset or called web service via dynamically generated code - doesn't matter for client. The bug you are currently experiencing, from user point of view - is not a bug at all.

Whether PHPUnit allows you to test private variables - I don't know. But from unit-testing perspective, you shouldn't do that.

Edit (in response to comment):

I understand your concerns about possible exposure of internal state, however I don't think unit testing is the right tool to deal with that. You can come up with a lot of possible scenarios how something might do something else which wasn't planned. Unit tests are by no means cure for all and shouldn't be used as such.

I just want to point out one thing. Let's forget about private fields for a moment and focus on what client of your class cares about. Your class exposes a contract, in this case - ability to alter and retrieve name (via getter and setter). Expected functionality is simple:

• when I set name with setName to "Gerald", I expect to get "Gerald" when I call getName

That's all. Client won't (well, shouldn't!) care about internal implementation. Whether you used private field name, hashset or called web service via dynamically generated code - doesn't matter for client. The bug you are currently experiencing, from user point of view - is not a bug at all.

Whether PHPUnit allows you to test private variables - I don't know. But from unit-testing perspective, you shouldn't do that.

I just want to point out one thing. Let's forget about private fields for a moment and focus on what client of your class cares about. Your class exposes a contract, in this case - ability to alter and retrieve name (via getter and setter). Expected functionality is simple:

• when I set name with setName to "Gerald", I expect to get "Gerald" when I call getName

That's all. Client won't (well, shouldn't!) care about internal implementation. Whether you used private field name, hashset or called web service via dynamically generated code - doesn't matter for client. The bug you are currently experiencing, from user point of view - is not a bug at all.

Whether PHPUnit allows you to test private variables - I don't know. But from unit-testing perspective, you shouldn't do that.

Edit (in response to comment):

I understand your concerns about possible exposure of internal state, however I don't think unit testing is the right tool to deal with that. You can come up with a lot of possible scenarios how something might do something else which wasn't planned. Unit tests are by no means cure for all and shouldn't be use as such.