Running unit tests and integration tests separately with Maven and TestNG

Recently for my new pet project I decided that I would like to have some tests executed during the standard mvn test and some other ones only during a different phase, let’s call it integration phase. I googled and googled and nothing seemed to work, so after struggling with making my setup work I’ve decided to write down my findings on how I was able to configure TestNG with Maven to run integration and unit tests separately.

Basic (not working) setup

For integration testing there is a Maven Failsafe plugin that is supposed to do what we want out of the box. Unfortunately, things are not as easy and straightforward as we might expect.

Let’s look at a basic setup that should work:

We have two test classes, one with IT postfix that will indicate that this is our integration test:

import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import static org.fest.assertions.Assertions.assertThat;

public class ExampleUnitTest {

    @Test
    public void shouldPass() {
        assertThat(false).isFalse();
    }
}

and

import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import static org.fest.assertions.Assertions.assertThat;

public class StatusTestIT {

    @Test
    public void shouldFail() {
        assertThat("aaa").isEqualTo("");
    }
}

and now let’s declare the plugin mentioned above in our pom.xml:

<project>

    <!-- ... -->
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <!-- ... -->
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.9</version>
            </plugin>

            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.13</version>
                <configuration>
                    <includes>
                        <include>**/*IT.java</include>
                    </includes>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

After that we should see two things. mvn test should pass as we have one green test in the ExampleUnitTest class, but mvn failsafe:integration-test should fail with StatusTestIT red. But as I said before, this does not work. mvn test looks as expected, but the second Maven execution is passing as well showing that no tests were run. Plugin seems to omit our completely valid test…

Small fix doing its job

After testing different approaches I found out that all we need to make this setup work is to add the plugin execution to the integration-test phase of the maven life cycle. So tiny change, but now our integration tests are executed only when we call mvn integration-test.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.13</version>
    <configuration>
        <includes>
            <include>**/*IT.java</include>
        </includes>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>failsafe-integration-tests</id>
            <phase>integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>integration-test</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

And that’s all, we could execute integration tests only when we really want to. Of course there are some things to remember when adopting the setup described above:

• our unit tests must have Test postfix, if you use something else, we have to configure the surefire plugin using include
• during integration test unit tests are executed too. This is a small flaw in this setup, but exclude **/*Test.java seems not to work 🙁

Source code of this example setup is available on GitHub