JUnit tests pass in Eclipse but fail in Maven Surefire

Question

I have written some JUnit tests using JUnit 4 and spring-test libraries. When I run the tests inside Eclipse then run fine and pass. But when I run them using Maven (during

Answer 1

[I am not sure that this is an answer to the original question, since the stacktrace here looks slightly different, but it may be useful to others.]

You can get tests failing in Surefire when you are also running Cobertura (to get code coverage reports). This is because Cobertura requires proxies (to measure code use) and there is some kind of conflict between those and Spring proxies. This only occurs when Spring uses cglib2, which would be the case if, for example, you have proxy-target-class="true", or if you have an object that is being proxied that does not implement interfaces.

The normal fix to this is to add an interface. So, for example, DAOs should be interfaces, implemented by a DAOImpl class. If you autowire on the interface, everything will work fine (because cglib2 is no longer required; a simpler JDK proxy to the interface can be used instead and Cobertura works fine with this).

However, you cannot use interfaces with annotated controllers (you will get a runtime error when trying to use the controller in a servlet) - I do not have a solution for Cobertura + Spring tests that autowire controllers.