How to get all failing tests for a multimodule Maven project
Maven testing
One of the bothering thing being a contractor is that you often happen to work on a project with a skip tests flag set on all developers computer.
One of the thing I tend to do when on such project is enabling tests and trying to fix as much as possible (often the fixes are easy to do).
Multi module testing
By design, surefire plugin make the build fail if there is a test failure. While this is ok in single module, when working with multi-module project it can be nice to run all tests on all modules regardless of the failures happening in some modules.
Maven is a great tool and allows such a behavior very easily, it allows two command line switches for that :
-
--fail-at-end: will fail the build at the end if there is test failures -
--fail-never: will never fail the build, even if there is test failures
Flags behavior differences
There is one thing to understand when using the
--fail-at-end flag, it will fail the build at end for a
module with test failure but it will also prevents building of
dependent modules.
With a small example it become obvious. Let’s say that we have a multi project containing the following :
- core : containing model objects and services
- web : containing web views for browser access
- javafx : containing desktop application classes
It is straightforward to see that web and
javafx modules will depends on the
core module.
fail-at-end
If using the --fail-at-end flag, a test failure in the
core module will prevent building the web and
javafx module completely : you will not be able to
track tests failure before fixing the ones from
core (at least on a single build command).
fail-never
If using the --fail-never flag, a test failure in the
core module will be reported but the build and tests of
the web and javafx modules will be built
and their respective tests errors will also be reported.
Tired of typing
If you find that typing --fail-at-end is too long,
remember yourself it short alias : -fae.
The same is also available for the --fail-never flag
with : -fn.