In PHPUnit, to test that an exception is thrown in a given piece of code, the _expectException*()_ methods or the _@expectedException*_ annotations can be used. For such a test to succeed, something in the test method has to throw an exception with the awaited properties. Having an assertion at the end of such a test method, means that, if the test succeeds, that assertion was never evaluated because an exception was thrown before getting to that point.