Can I make JUnit more verbose?

Adding some info that would have been helpful to me when I wanted JUnit to be more verbose and stumbled on this question. Maybe it will help other testers in the future.

If you are running JUnit from Ant, and want to see what tests are being run, you can add the following to your task:

<junit showoutput="true" printsummary="on" enabletestlistenerevents="true" fork="@{fork}" forkmode="once" haltonfailure="no" timeout="1800000">

Note that showoutput, printsummary, and enabletestlistenerevents are what helped, not the other task attributes. If you set these, you'll get output like:

Running com.foo.bar.MyTest
junit.framework.TestListener: tests to run: 2
junit.framework.TestListener: startTest(myTestOne)
junit.framework.TestListener: endTest(myTestOne)
junit.framework.TestListener: startTest(myTestTwo)
junit.framework.TestListener: endTest(myTestTwo)
Tests run: 2, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Time elapsed: 0.495 sec

This was useful to me when my tests were timing out and I wasn't sure which tests were actually taking too long, and which tests got cancelled because they were unlucky enough to be running when the time was up.

Are you really interested in an assertion that succeeds? Normally, the only interesting assertions are ones that fail.

Being a fervent JUnit devotee myself, I try and make the output of the tests as quiet as possible because it improves the signal-to-noise ratio when something doesn't pass. The best test run is one where everything passes and there's not a peep from stdout.

You could always work on your unit test until it succeeds and run "grep Assert test.java | wc -l". :-)

If you want to see some output for each successful assertion, another simple approach which requires no external dependencies or source code, would be to define your own Assert class which delegates all methods to the standard JUnit Assert class, as well as logging successful assertions (failed assertions will be reported as usual by the JUnit class).

You then run a global search-and-replace on your test classes from "org.junit.Assert" => "com.myco.test.Assert", which should fix-up all regular and static import statements.

You could also then easily migrate your approach to the quieter-is-better-camp and change the wrapper class to just report the total # of passed assertions per test or per class, etc.

You can use AOP (with Spring or AspectJ) define pointcuts on all assert methods in junit.framework.Assert class. Using spring you can implement your own class as after returning advice (http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/aop.html#aop-advice-after-returning) which will only be called if the assert method passed (otherwise it throws an exception: junit.framework.AssertionFailedError ). In you own class you can implement a simple counter and print it at the end.