Why We Refactored JUnit

Related link: http://www.artima.com/suiterunner/why.html

Artima.com has published an article by Bill Venners, Matt Gerrans, and Frank Sommers in which they explain why JUnit didn't solve their particular testing problems, and how they created Artima SuiteRunner, a free, open source test toolkit and JUnit runner.

Here's an excerpt:

Because JUnit links the concepts of running and reporting in the notion of a runner, we made Artima SuiteRunner a JUnit runner. You can use Artima SuiteRunner to run and report results of JUnit tests, just like you can use JUnit's text or Swing runners. The three main advantages of using SuiteRunner to run your JUnit tests are reporters, runpaths, and recipe files:

• A reporter collects and presents test results in a highly customizable way to the user. Examples are text, graphics, Web pages, database output, CSV files, XML, and email alerts.

• A runpath lets you load classes for your tests from anywhere with an easy- to-configure list of filenames, directory paths, and/or URLs.

• A recipe file captures and saves in a file the run properties of a particular suite of tests for easy reuse.