Submitted by Tomek Kaczanowski on Mon, 12/17/2012 - 14:16

Some time ago I was complaining about the stagnancy of JUnit. This project - even if used by the majority of Java developers - looked abandoned. No new releases, no activity on the mailing list, no updates on the website. However in recent weeks things started to look better. I would like to share with you some comments regarding JUnit current progress.

BTW. I am a long-time TestNG user, but I also use JUnit in some older project. And wish JUnit all the best - we need some competition in testing frameworks area. :)

Few things happened in recent weeks that drew my attention to JUnit.

First of all JUnit 4.11 was released (see the full changelog). No groundbreaking changes there, but many important updates, including some possibility to run tests in certain orders (however very limited, as JUnit still rejects the idea of any kind of tests dependencies).

Second, there is a lot of activity on the mailing list (which was almost dead for quite a long time) and within the community. There is some effort to put up a new JUnit website. People ask about ways to contribute, discuss the state of some features (e.g. categories) and even plan JUnit 5. You can say this is nothing impressive but after such a long time of no activity I am happy to see there is still some life there. :)

There are also some new project emerging around JUnit, like the new initiative of providing Data Driven Testing to JUnit ( see EasyTest) or another attempt at parameterized tests (see Zohhak).

It seems to me that something good has happened recently among JUnit developers and there is a new hope that the project will be developed further. Which is something that thousands of JUnit users are surely waiting for. :)