Garrett, It sounds like alternatives to JUnit is not a priority to you. I am not convinced I should care either. But, I think your insistence that, "The existing stuff works just fine", is not a valid argument for not doing an evaluation.
ant and maven are de facto standards because enough people started using them that they became the way to build java projects. Before the advent of ant and maven, a person had to actually go out and "evaluate" that ant was better than make. Of course, someone could make the claim that "Hey, the existing stuff works just fine. Let's not do an eval." That would be a valid argument if they 1) knew enough about alternatives to know that they didn't need any of their features 2) had more important things to worry about.
Well, there will obviously be new test cases, but I don't see how that leads to "so we should dive into an evaluation of competing testing frameworks". The existing stuff works just fine.
If there is a compelling reason to change frameworks, then the sooner it happens the sooner the test cases can take advantage of them. It doesn't make sense to change frameworks after the immeninent test cases are written. Whether or not to change frameworks and whether or not to even consider different frameworks are two separate arguements.
Ant and Maven provide abilities /that we need/ that you cannot easily do in make. They're also defacto standards in the Java world. Neither of those are true for JUnit 4 or TestNG at this time, AFAIK.
Can you clarify what "AFAIK" entails? Did you already evaluate whether or not features from JUnit 4 and TestNG are not useful for our purposes? If so, you should have just said so, no need to argue about something that's already done. If not, how can you make such blanket statements? Joe
