maven和单元测试 - 结合maven surefire插件和testNG eclipse插件

Question

could you please share your way of unit testing in eclipse ? Are you using surefire plugin, m2eclipse & maven, or only testNG eclipse plugin ? Do you combine these alternatives ?

I'm using testNG + maven surefire-plugin and I had been using the testNG eclipse plugin a year ago so that I could see the results in testNG view. Then I started using Maven, but when I do "maven test phase" using m2eclipse, there is only console output and surefire reports that I can check in browser and to choose what test suite, test, or test method can be set up only via testng.xml.

On the other hand, if you use only surefire plugin and you have some specific settings regarding classpath etc., that you rely on, then running tests via testNG eclipse plugin doesn't have to be compatible with your code. Using surefire plugin, the classpath is different - target/test-classes and target/classes - than using testNG plugin, that is using the project classpath.

How do you go about what I was just talking about?

Is it possible to synchronize "maven test" using m2eclipse and surefire plugin WITH testNG eclipse plugin and view ?

EDITED: I'm also wondering, why the Maven project ("Java build path") output folder is target/classes for src/main and src/test whereas surefire plugin makes two locations target/test-classes and target/classes

Thank you very much for your your opinions.

Answer 1

Lisa,

You can configure the TestNG Eclipse plug-in to "watch" a test-output directory. Point it to target/surefire-reports and you should see your TestNG view update itself a few seconds after a Maven build terminates.

Answer 2

I see two advantages of using the surefire plugin:

• Relying on the eclipse plugin only works that way when everyone in the project uses eclipse
• Surefire plugin can run from build that are done from the continuous integration server ("jenkins")

And then if you have larger more long running (performance) test suites, you probably don't want to "block" your IDE while they run.

Answer 3

I don't think it is true what you say with the different runtime classpath, I just checked myself both maven classpath and the one when test is run via testNG eclipse plugin and both are the same. I think that m2eclipse plugin takes care of it. It's the same even for junit testing.

So afaik, there is no restriction for using testNG eclipse plugin for development and surefire plugin for instance for continuous integration as Heiko Rupp mentions. At least I have never gotten any troubles with it.

Just use both as you like, cheers !