Improve Your JUnit Experience with This Annotation

JUnit is probably part of 90% of all Java projects. And the exciting thing is, we’ll soon have JUnit 5 with Java 8 support. We’ve blogged about an improvement recently.

Back in JUnit 4 land, there’s this little trick that I can only recommend you put in all of your unit tests. Just add this little annotation here and you’ll be much more happy:

@FixMethodOrder(MethodSorters.NAME_ASCENDING)
class MyTests {
    ...
}

What does it do? It’s simple. It fixes JUnit’s weird default of not defaulting to any testing order. Sure, not having any order in your tests might help accidentally discover some evil test inter-dependency. But usually, when you’re looking for individual tests and results, e.g. in your IDE, it’s just much better to be able to visually scan the test suite and find the right method.

E.g. what do you prefer? This?

Or this?

Exactly. Finally, a useful annotation. Just put the following everywhere and help make this a slightly better world:

@FixMethodOrder(MethodSorters.NAME_ASCENDING)
class MyTests {
    ...
}