Is there a way to “fail fast” for junit with the maven surefire plugin?

Question

I\'m currently working on a java project using maven. We use the maven surefire plugin to run our junit suite as part of the build process.

Our test suite is rapidl

Answer 1

There may be a suitable workaround, but it depends on your requirements and you need to use a CI server which can handle jvm process return codes.

The basic idea is to stop Maven's JVM process altogether and let the OS know that the process has stopped unexpectedly. Then, a continuous integration server like Jenkins/Hudson should be able to check for a non-zero exit code and let you know that a test has failed.

The first step is to make surefire exit the JVM at the first test failure. You can do that with JUnit 4.7 or higher by using a custom RunListener (put it in src/test/java):

package org.example
import org.junit.runner.notification.Failure;
import org.junit.runner.notification.RunListener;
public class FailFastListener extends RunListener {
        public void testFailure(Failure failure) throws Exception {
                System.err.println("FAILURE: " + failure);
                System.exit(-1);
        }
}

Then, you need to configure that class so surefire will register it with the JUnit 4 Runner. Edit your pom.xml and add the listener configuration property to the maven-surefire-plugin. You will also need to configure surefire to not fork a new JVM process for executing the tests. Otherwise, it will just go on with the next test cases.

    org.apache.maven.plugins
    maven-surefire-plugin
    2.10
    
        never
        
            
                listener
                org.example.FailFastListener
            
        
    

If this does not help, I'd try to fork the maven surefire junit provider plugin.

Btw, unit tests, by definition, should run faster than 0.1 seconds. If your build really takes so long due to the unit tests, you will have to make them run faster in the future.