Here's a bit less philosophical, more practical description of Surefire v. Failsafe.
Remember that if you use the maven-surefire-plugin, it's going to execute during the Maven "test" phase by default, and fail the build on errors _during that phase_ if any tests fail. The maven-failsafe-plugin executes during Maven's "integration-test" and "validate" phases. *Remember to specify both goals!* See http://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-failsafe-plugin/usage.html and notice that _both_ goals, integration-test & validate, need to be specified. This allows the integration tests to execute & possibly fail without _immediately_ failing the build. The failing of the build happens via maven-failsafe-plugin during the validate phase, so that other plugins can clean things up during Maven's "post-integration-test" phase, which precedes "validate". HTH, Matthew On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Matthew Adams <matt...@matthewadams.me>wrote: > On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Ron Wheeler < > rwhee...@artifact-software.com> wrote: > >> On 13/11/2013 11:16 AM, Matthew Adams wrote: >> >>> I don't think timing should be the heuristic here. The fact that unit >>> tests take less is a result of the fact that what you're testing, aka the >>> "unit", tends to be small. After all, a unit test should test a "unit". >>> >> So what is your definition? >> > "A unit test is test code that tests a unit in isolation." It's > intentionally ambiguous, because a unit is relative and may differ. > > >> >>> An integration test, then, if I were defining it strictly, would be >>> anything that's not a unit test. In practice, this usually means >>> replacing >>> any mocks and/or stubs in your unit tests with the real implementations, >>> plus using any other supporting infrastructure, like databases, >>> dependency >>> injection contexts, etc. >>> >> Not sure that this is true for all integration tests. You may be able to >> test the integration of two projects (a web service and a database access >> layer) while still using mocks and stubs (mock of a database persistence >> layer). >> People frequently test with Jetty when the final project will run on >> Tomcat. >> It all depends on what part of the system integration is being tested. >> > > I didn't say it had to be what's used in production. The key difference > is that you're using _something_, in addition to the unit. > > -matthew > -- mailto:matt...@matthewadams.me <matt...@matthewadams.me> skype:matthewadams12 googletalk:matt...@matthewadams.me http://matthewadams.me http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewadams
