Concept

Modern build tools such as Maven or Gradle have a test phase of the build lifecycle to execute the unit tests of an application. This capability is used in the automated testing to manage the execution of automated tests (instead of unit tests). As the result, all automated tests are located under src/test as well as any test execution configurations are managed through the build tools.

The used solution has 3 main gaps:

1. There is no place for unit tests as it is already owned by automated tests. But sometimes unit tests are useful even for the automated testing as they allow to check some specific implementations to be used during the automation.
2. Hard to configure tests suites. This is because you need to run all unit tests at the same time during the project’s build cycle. And build tools support it very well. But for automated tests, it is often required to run only a subset of tests (or even only single test). The build tools are not so good at doing this.
3. There is no chance to create a JAR file and distribute automated tests like a standard Java archive. That’s why in addition to a Java installation, build tool and other dependencies are required to run the tests. And this is a pain especially if you are supporting the tests execution or trying to dockerize them.

What does Sunshine offer?

It wraps a test runner and allows programmatic configuration of the tests suites. This decouples automated tests execution from a build tool and moves a project with automated tests toward the regular Java project structure.

Want to see a small demonstration? Please check out the video

The code is located on https://github.com/extsoft/jcat. Feel free to check it out and make your own experiments.

Now you are ready to move further with Getting started.