The Source

• Often when I'm auto-completing classes in my IDE, I get the suggestion to use the *Test file.
• Project wide searches and Usage Finder always shows tests using the search key or method/class etc.
• KernelTestCase and WebTestCase are library dependencies in a test directory

I'm working on adding some functional tests to a bundle and this gave me a problem. I had to depend on the FrameworkBundle 2.3 for BC reasons but I couldn't depend on 2.3 because that one didn't have the KernelTestCase yet so I needed 2.5.

The Symptoms

For applications the recommended location is in /tests/. For Application bundles this seem to be /Tests/ and the same goes for re-usable bundles.

The current setup with the recommendations and implementations cause a few issues:

• I need to load files from the vendor Tests in order to run my tests.
• I get vendor test files which I can autoload and depend on.
• 2 different recommendations for test locations.
• I cannot easily exclude them from the distributed version.

The Solution

Personally I always put my code in bundles in the /src/ directory, this gives me a clean root directory and my tests in /test/. This leaves the root directory for all the meta-information for your package (example). So my suggestion is:

• Extract the WebTestCase and KernelTestCase to another component (PhpunitBridge?) where they can reside in the source instead of test location.
• Exclude the tests from the archive.
• Not put the source in the package root but in /src/ like suggested for applications. Not going to happen due to subtree split.
• Put tests in /test/ or /tests/ where they have an autoload-dev so they cannot be loaded in production code.

This will create a clearer structure where your source is not polluted by the tests and you cannot put anything of your public api in your tests (like the TestCases). When the test-cases are moved out, I can also require 2.3 or higher instead of 2.5 and higher (thus 2.7).