How do you unit test private methods?

Question

I\'m building a class library that will have some public & private methods. I want to be able to unit test the private methods (mostly while developing, but also it coul

Answer 1

I'm surprised nobody has said this yet, but a solution I have employed is to make a static method inside the class to test itself. This gives you access to everything public and private to test with.

Furthermore, in a scripting language (with OO abilities, like Python, Ruby and PHP), you can make the file test itself when run. Nice quick way of making sure your changes didn't break anything. This obviously makes a scalable solution to testing all your classes: just run them all. (you can also do this in other languages with a void main which always runs its tests as well).