How maven pom.xml identifies the testng test cases in a non-standard project structure?

Question

I am completely new to maven and testng. I am using maven as build tool, and testng as my testing framework. I am not following the standard maven project structure. Now I want my pom.xml to execute the test cases in my project. The question is, how pom.xml knows what are the test cases to consider for execution?

Answer 1

If you keep this in a single place you need to set the testClassesDirectory argument of the maven-surefire-plugin configuration:

<project>
  [...]
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.17</version>
        <configuration>
          <testClassesDirectory>path/to/compiled test classes</testClassesDirectory>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  [...]
</project>

All of this is well documented in the Maven Surefire Plugin Documentation