Java tool for testing private methods?

Question

There are different opinions on the meaningfulness of testing of private methods, e.g., here and here. I personally think it makes sense, the question is how to do it properly.

Answer 1

There are number of approaches to take

• Don't test private methods as they are hidden implementation details which should never make a difference to the caller.
• Make the methods package local so a caller cannot access them, but you can access them in the same package i.e. a unit test.
• Make the unit test an inner class or provide a package local inner class. Not sure this is an improvement!
• Use reflection to access the methods of the class. This is like marking a method rpivate when its not and is a confusion IMHO. You should be only marking a method private when it is truely private.