You generally don't unit test private methods directly. Since they are private, consider them an implementation detail. Nobody is ever going to call one of them and expect it to work a particular way.
You should instead test your public interface. If the methods that call your private methods are working as you expect, you then assume by extension that your private methods are working correctly.
========================================== In general, I would avoid it. If your private method is so complex that it needs a separate unit test, it often means that it deserved its own class. This may encourage you to write it in a way which is reusable. You should then test the new class and call the public interface of it in your old class.
On the other hand, sometimes factoring out the implementation details into separate classes leads to classes with complex interfaces, lots of data passing between the old and new class, or to a design which may look good from the OOP point of view, but does not match the intuitions coming from the problem domain (e.g. splitting a pricing model into two pieces just to avoid testing private methods is not very intuitive and may lead to problems later on when maintaining/extending the code). You don't want to have "twin classes" which are always changed together.
When faced with a choice between encapsulation and testability, I'd rather go for the second. It's more important to have the correct code (i.e. produce the correct output) than a nice OOP design which doesn't work correctly, because it wasn't tested adequately. In Java, you can simply give the method "default" access and put the unit test in the same package. Unit tests are simply part of the package you're developing, and it's OK to have a dependency between the tests and the code which is being tested. It means that when you change the implementation, you may need to change your tests, but that's OK -- each change of the implementation requires re-testing the code, and if the tests need to be modified to do that, then you just do it.
In general, a class may be offering more than one interface. There is an interface for the users, and an interface for the maintainers. The second one can expose more to ensure that the code is adequately tested. It doesn't have to be a unit test on a private method -- it could be, for example, logging. Logging also "breaks encapsulation", but we still do it, because it's so useful.
Testing of private methods would depend on their complexity; some one line private methods wouldn't really warrant the extra effort of testing (this can also be said of public methods), but some private methods can be just as complex as public methods, and difficult to test through the public interface.
My preferred technique is to make the private method package private, which will allow access to a unit test in the same package but it will still be encapsulated from all other code. This will give the advantage of testing the private method logic directly instead of having to rely on a public method test to cover all parts of (possibly) complex logic.
If this is paired with the @VisibleForTesting annotation in the Google Guava library, you are clearly marking this package private method as visible for testing only and as such, it shouldn't be called by any other classes.
Opponents of this technique argue that this will break encapsulation and open private methods to code in the same package. While I agree that this breaks encapsulation and does open private code to other classes, I argue that testing complex logic is more important than strict encapsulation and not using package private methods which are clearly marked as visible for testing only must be the responsibility of the developers using and changing the code base.
Private method before testing:
private int add(int a, int b){
return a + b;
}
Package private method ready for testing:
@VisibleForTesting
int add(int a, int b){
return a + b;
}
Note: Putting tests in the same package is not equivalent to putting them in the same physical folder. Separating your main code and test code into separate physical folder structures is good practice in general but this technique will work as long as the classes are defined as in the same package.
============================== Way 2: If you are using java, you can use jmockit which provides Deencapsulation.invoke to call any private method of the class under testing. It uses reflection to call it eventually but provides a nice wrapper around it. (https://code.google.com/p/jmockit/)