Sunday, October 23, 2005

TESTARE - junit integration

I've started to work on JUnit integration for TESTARE, my java testing framework. My approach for this integration effort is to enable projects that have already invested a great deal into a JUnit based test development effort to easily implement in container testing. Apart from that, there are a few other advantages coming out of this, like TESTARE test cases will be automatically discovered and executed by JUnit test case/suite runners, like those in IDEA and Eclipse - this is already starting to work, the code is in CVS and you can do a checkout at java.net

The goal is also to support at least one other mainstream testing framework, like TestNG. This is because I don't want to discriminate TestNG users over JUnit users. I see TESTARE as a new layer, that enables in container testing for regular testing frameworks.

I would like to use this opportunity to notice the lack of support JUnit offers for writing extensions. In order to properly integrate TESTARE, I absolutely need the following:
* receive an event before the execution of the first test in the suite
* receive an event after the execution of the last test in the suite
* enable extension writers to register a factory to instantiate tests present in a class

Right now I don't have any of these. It would be really great if the JUnit team would rethink their approach on how to handle extensions. This would make the life much more easier for many extension projects. But I promise I'll write more in details about this and approach the JUnit team about it.