Maven Surefire Plugin

is designed to run our unit tests. The following patterns are the defaults so that the plugin will detect a class as a test:

• **/Test*.java
• **/*Test.java
• **/*Tests.java
• **/*TestCase.java

Maven Failsafe Plugin

Designed to run our integration tests. Unlike the Maven Surefire Plugin, the Maven Failsafe Plugin is not a core plugin and hence won't be part of our project unless we manually include it. Detects our integration tests by the following default patterns:

• **/IT*.java
• **/*IT.java
• **/*ITCase.java

Maven commands explained

The following commands will not run the integration tests which contains the above-mentioned patterns.

mvn surefire:test

mvn test

If we want to run our integration tests manually, we can do so with the following command:

mvn failsafe:integration-test failsafe:verify

The following will run both the integration and unit test if maven-failsafe-plugin is mentioned in the pom file.

mvn verify

For scenarios where we don't want to run our integration test (but still our unit tests), we can add -DskipITs to our Maven execution:

mvn verify -DskipITs

Slice Annotations

@WebMvcTest

This annotation creates a Spring TestContext with only relevant Spring MVC (model-view-controller) components:

• @Controller and @RestController
• @ControllerAdvice
• @JsonComponent
• Converter, Filter, WebMvcConfigurer

@DataJpaTest

Spring TestContext contains the following components:

• @Repository or any class extending a Spring Data repository
• EntityManager and TestEntityManager ??
• DataSource

Nevertheless, it's still worthing testing the entire JPA entity lifecycle by storing an entity, flushing the EntityManager, and retrieving the entity from the database again. This way, we ensure that Hibernate can destruct and construct our entity objects.