Hi, First of all, please don't blame me for my horrible english. I'm french, and french guys are known for beeing poor foreign language speackers...
maven default lifecycle defines integration-test phase, but AFAIK there is no consensus (yet) on how to use it. Some wiki doc help to setup a maven/surefire hack to split test into unit / integration based on naming conventions, but nothing better. I'd like to suggest some convention and maybe plugins enhancement to support integration tests in a common way. *What's an IT test ? *Just to keep things clear, I thing "intergation-test" is a far too large word. Some of us consider tests that require a container (typically, war deployed and selenium test), some other consider tests that require host or network resources (DataBase-related tests) and others simply tests that require complex setup and not just "unit" scope, like GWTTestCase or Spring-related ones that start an ApplicationContext. Based on this, I don't thing we can define a 100% consensus on how to define and run IT tests with maven. I'll focus on the simpliest use case : tests written in Java that you don't want / can't run before packaging. I suppose the pre-integration test phase is enough to setup all required infrastructure to get IT test running. *What's wrong with the existing solutions ? *Even it works in many cases, I don't like the Test naming convention hack to use a shared target/test-classes for all tests - there is no way to distinguish unit and IT resources - there is no nice distinction between unit and IT tests.This doesn't help newbee developpers to understand the role of such code - hey, this really looks like an ugly maven hack ! We should support IT tests with no configuration as we support compilation and unit tests with a minimal POM. *What is missing in maven ?* - there is no convention for an IT-tests source directory. - there is no maven-compiler-plugin Mojo to handle such java sources, with a dedicated output folder - there is no maven-resources-plugin Mojo to handle resources dedicated to IT tests - there is no maven-surefire-plugin Mojo to run them *What can we do ?* Define a dedicated directory for IT tests. As a new XML element in POM would require to change the ModelVersion with compatibility issues, I'd suggest to define a standard property project.build.integrationTestSourceDirectory (the same way we did for encoding), with default value to src/integration-test/java. Same for IT resources Either define new Mojos in compiler, resources and surefire plugins (that would require 3 new releases), or create a new maven-integration-tests-plugin to share code from those 3 plugins and handle the whole process : compile integrationTestSourceDirectory to target/integration-tests-classes copy IT resources to target/integration-tests-classes run tests found in target/integration-tests-classes, with target/classes and target/test-classes in classpath. Any suggestion, feedback or link to an existing solution is welcome Cheers, Nicolas
