Test Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy (test tooling): a clear "buy." Hoa\Test is a CLI test harness that wrapped atoum and bundled coverage and mutation-testing runs behind one command (hoa test:run). That bundling is the interesting product idea; the implementation is not a dependency we can own. Decision: adopt Pest / PHPUnit + Infection + ParaTest under php artisan test, and treat Hoa\Test as a requirements reference, not a component.
• Roadmap / dependency investment: zero. Archived, last release 2017-08-18, 11 stars, 0 dependents, and a dependency on atoum (itself no longer actively developed). There is no maintainer to take a security patch, no PHP 8.x support path, and no Laravel integration surface (no service provider, no config publishing, no Artisan commands). Nothing on the roadmap should route through it.
• Feature definition for our own test-DX work. If we invest in a single "quality gate" command for our Laravel apps (coverage threshold + mutation score threshold + parallel run in one invocation), Hoa\Test's command design is useful prior art for scoping that requirement — it tells us what a unified harness needs to expose, and equally how little teams actually used it.
• Migration archaeology. The one live use case: a legacy codebase still on the Hoa suite (PHP 5.6/7.0 era) where Hoa\Test is already in require-dev. That is a de-risking/remediation decision ("fork-and-vendor vs. replace"), not an adoption decision.
• Sourcing hygiene. It is a useful calibration case for our package-evaluation rubric: high conceptual relevance to testing, near-zero health score. It validates that we weight maintenance signals (archived flag, release recency, dependents) above feature-checklist appeal.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it only under a narrow, largely historical set of conditions:

• You are maintaining an existing Hoa-based application pinned to PHP 5.6/7.0 that already runs hoa test:run in CI, and replacing the harness would destabilize a release. Even then, the correct move is to fork and vendor it internally with an owner and a removal date — never a fresh composer require.
• You want a read-only reference for how to design a single-command coverage + mutation gate for a PHP project.

Look elsewhere when any of the following is true — which, for essentially all new work, it is:

• You are on Laravel 9/10/11 or PHP 8.1+. Hoa's components predate these and are not maintained against them; there is no supported upgrade path.
• You need ongoing security patching, CVE response, or a maintainer to escalate to. Archived repositories fail all three.
• You need CI ergonomics: parallel test execution, JUnit/Clover output consumed by modern dashboards, IDE/static-analysis integration, GitHub Actions recipes. Use Pest/PHPUnit, Infection, and ParaTest.
• You need team onboarding. Zero dependents and 11 stars means no community answers, no Stack Overflow corpus, and no third-party tutorials — every question becomes internal archaeology.
• You need Laravel-native behavior: test database lifecycle, RefreshDatabase, HTTP/kernel testing helpers, factories, mocked queues and events. Hoa\Test has no awareness of any of this.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: We evaluated hoa/test as a candidate for our PHP test tooling and are recommending against adoption. The package is archived, last shipped in August 2017, has 11 GitHub stars and zero dependent projects, and is built on a test engine that is itself no longer developed. Adopting it would introduce an unpatchable dependency in our build pipeline in exchange for functionality we already get from actively maintained tools. Recommendation: standardize on Pest/PHPUnit with Infection for mutation testing. Cost of this decision is effectively zero; the risk of the alternative is an unowned component in CI with no upgrade path to current PHP.

For engineering: Nothing to adopt. We'll use it only as a design reference if we build a consolidated "quality gate" command — it's a good example of wrapping coverage and mutation checks into one CLI verb, and a good cautionary example of how little adoption that packaging actually earned. Current stack: php artisan test (Pest or PHPUnit) for the suite, ParaTest for parallelism, Infection for mutation score gating. If any legacy service still references hoa/test, flag it in the dependency inventory with an owner and a replacement ticket — that's a remediation item, not a greenfield choice.