You seem to be aware already, but I'll just restate it anyway; It's a bad sign, if you need to test protected methods. The aim of a unit test, is to test the interface of a class, and protected methods are implementation details. That said, there are cases where it makes sense. If you use inheritance, you can see a superclass as providing an interface for the subclass. So here, you would have to test the protected method (But never a private one). The solution to this, is to create a subclass for testing purpose, and use this to expose the methods. Eg.:
class Foo {
protected function stuff() {
// secret stuff, you want to test
}
}
class SubFoo extends Foo {
public function exposedStuff() {
return $this->stuff();
}
}
Note that you can always replace inheritance with composition. When testing code, it's usually a lot easier to deal with code that uses this pattern, so you may want to consider that option.