How to Not Run Integration Tests With the Eclipse JUnit Plugin

Here is the scenario.  A Maven multi-module project being developed in Eclipse, the m2e plugin keeps the different modules in sync in eclipse, integration and unit tests mixed throughout each project, and integration tests using the naming convention *IntegrationTest.java.

Here is the problem.  Using maven to run unit tests for the entire project kind of sucks.  I mean it's easy to limit the tests being run with the maven sure fire plugin's exclude, but the problems are 1) it takes too long to build the project before the tests are run and 2) if you have altered a upstream project it won't show any compile problems in eclipse because m2e keeps them in sync, but the maven build doesn't seem to know about it so it fails to build.

Half of the solution

The first half of the solution is the JUnit plugin that comes with eclipse.  You can right-click on a project and Run As a JUnit Test, or ctrl+alt+shift+T, and it will run through all the tests really fast.

This is only half of the solution because it also runs through the integration tests, which generally take a long time.  

To work around running the integration tests you can create a test suite.  The test suite is a pretty good way to  limit what tests are run, but out of the box JUnit 4 requires you to either annotate each test with a @Category annotation on each test and then to use the @IncludeCategory or @ExcludeCategory on the test suite.  Or, the other less friendly version would be to use the @SuiteClasses annotation on the test suite and list out each test class individually.  When you have hundreds of test classes this is a lot of work.

The other half of the solution

What we really need is a way to use some wild cards to limit the tests we want to run.  Similar to the surefire plugin's exclude.  The solution I've come across is something called the JUnit Toolbox.  The cool thing about the project is that it has a couple of custom runners that allow you to specify wildcards in the classes to run. What that means is that we can write a test suite like this

   import org.junit.runner.RunWith;

   import com.googlecode.junittoolbox.ParallelSuite;

   import com.googlecode.junittoolbox.SuiteClasses;

   @RunWith(ParallelSuite.class)

   @SuiteClasses({"**/*Test.class", "!**/*IntegrationTest.class"})

   public class AllUnitTestsTestSuite {} 

and it will only run the tests in that project that don't have IntegrationTest.class.

Now the only downside I've come across is that if you have classes that match the naming convention and they don't have tests in them you will get a initialization error, but you can use categories to restrict those ones.  Also if you're looking for something to run tests for all of your projects this doesn't seem to address that either.  All in all though, I've gone from having to use a fairly manual process that takes 20-30 seconds with maven to a pretty automatic one that takes about 9.