Ordering unit tests in Eclipse's JUnit view

Question

The JUnit view in Eclipse seems to order the tests randomly. How can I order them by class name?

Answer 1

If you really need hard dependency between your JUnit test, try JExample extension

JExample introduces producer-consumer relationships to unit-testing.
A producer is a test method that yields its unit under test as return value.
A consumer is a test method that depends on one or more producers and their return values.

You can install it in Eclipse, for Junit4.4 or 4.5.

import jexample.Depends;

  @Test
  @Depends("#testEmpty") 
  public Stack<Integer> testPush(Stack<Integer> $) { 
      $.push(42); 
      assertFalse($.isEmpty()); 
      return $; 
  } 

---

As mentioned in this IBM article "In pursuit of code quality: JUnit 4 vs. TestNG":

One thing the JUnit framework tries to achieve is test isolation.
On the downside, this makes it very difficult to specify an order for test-case execution, which is essential to any kind of dependent testing.
Developers have used different techniques to get around this, like specifying test cases in alphabetical order or relying heavily on fixtures (@Before @After) to properly set things up.

These workarounds are fine for tests that succeed, but for tests that fail, they have an inconvenient consequence: every subsequent dependent test also fails. In some situations, this can lead to large test suites reporting unnecessary failures

So beware: if you retain any solution for ordering your JUnit tests the way you want... you need to think if that solution support a "skip" feature in order to allow other tests to proceed even if one of them fails.