This doesn't happen to me with php5 but does with hhvm and roles translate + cirrussearch (or gettingstarted, which implies cirrussearch) enabled. Once I disabled cirrussearch and gettingstarted, the test was skipped correctly, "No test TTMServer available".
Niklas said "I think CirrusSearch should disable itself when it detects unit tests are being run".
vagrant@nemobis:/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/tests/phpunit$ php phpunit.php suites/ExtensionsTestSuite.php
[...]
PHPUnit 3.7.37 by Sebastian Bergmann.
[...]
There were 2 errors:
1) SolrTTMServerTest::testSearchableTTMServer
BadMethodCallException: Call to a member function getMessage() on a non-object (NULL)
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/Translate/tag/TranslatablePage.php:253
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/Translate/tag/PageTranslationHooks.php:47
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/includes/Hooks.php:206
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php:4031
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/includes/parser/Parser.php:402
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/includes/content/WikitextContent.php:327
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/includes/content/AbstractContent.php:486
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Updater.php:410
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Updater.php:330
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Updater.php:192
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Updater.php:67
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Job/LinksUpdate.php:48
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch/includes/Job/Job.php:55
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/Translate/tests/phpunit/SolrTTMServerTest.php:176
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/Translate/tests/phpunit/SolrTTMServerTest.php:36
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/tests/phpunit/MediaWikiTestCase.php:133
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/tests/phpunit/MediaWikiPHPUnitCommand.php:42
/srv/vagrant/mediawiki/tests/phpunit/phpunit.php:160
--------------------------
**Version**: unspecified
**Severity**: normal
**See Also**:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67295