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Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What is the difference between maven-failsafe-plugin and maven-surefire-plugin?
  2. How can I reuse my test code in other modules?
  3. Surefire fails with the message "The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye".
  4. Crashed Surefire or Failsafe plugin must indicate crashed tests
  5. How can I run GWT tests?
  6. How do I use properties set by other plugins in argLine?
  7. How maven-failsafe-plugin allows me to configure the jar file or classes to use?
  8. How to dump fatal errors and stack trace of plugin runtime if it fails?
What is the difference between maven-failsafe-plugin and maven-surefire-plugin?

maven-surefire-plugin is designed for running unit tests and if any of the tests fail then it will fail the build immediately.

maven-failsafe-plugin is designed for running integration tests, and decouples failing the build if there are test failures from actually running the tests.

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How can I reuse my test code in other modules?

Visit this link for your reference, | Attaching tests

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Surefire fails with the message "The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye".

Surefire does not support tests or any referenced libraries calling System.exit() at any time. If they do so, they are incompatible with Surefire and you should probably file an issue with the library/vendor. Alternatively the forked VM could also have crashed for a number of reasons. Look for the classical "hs_err*" files indicating VM crashes or examine the Maven log output when the tests execute. Some "extraordinary" output from crashing processes may be dumped to the console/log. If this happens on a CI environment and only after it runs for some time, there is a fair chance your test suite is leaking some kind of OS-level resource that makes things worse at every run. Regular OS-level monitoring tools may give you some indication.

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Crashed Surefire or Failsafe plugin must indicate crashed tests

After a forked JVM has crashed the console of forked JVM prints Crashed tests: and lists the last test which has crashed. In the console log you can find the message The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye.

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How can I run GWT tests?
There is a specific gwt-maven-plugin at codehaus, but if you want to run with Surefire, you need the following settings:

Use the following configuration:

<useSystemClassLoader>true</useSystemClassLoader>

<useManifestOnlyJar>false</useManifestOnlyJar>

<forkCount>1</forkCount>

 Try reuseForks=true and if it doesn't work, fall back to reuseForks=false

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How do I use properties set by other plugins in argLine?

Maven does property replacement for 

${...}
values in pom.xml before any plugin is run. So Surefire would never see the place-holders in its argLine property.

Since the Version 2.17 using an alternate syntax for these properties, 

@{...}
allows late replacement of properties when the plugin is executed, so properties that have been modified by other plugins will be picked up correctly.

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How maven-failsafe-plugin allows me to configure the jar file or classes to use?

By default maven-failsafe-plugin uses project artifact file in test classpath if packaging is set to "jar" in pom.xml. This can be modified and for instance set to main project classes if you use configuration parameter "classesDirectory". This would mean that you set value "${project.build.outputDirectory}" for the parameter "classesDirectory" in the configuration of plugin.

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How to dump fatal errors and stack trace of plugin runtime if it fails?

By default maven-failsafe-plugin and maven-surefire-plugin dumps fatal errors in dump files and these are located in target/failsafe-reports and target/surefire-reports. Names of dump files are formatted as follows:

[date]-jvmRun[N].dump

[date]-jvmRun[N].dumpstream

[date].dumpstream

 Forked JVM process and plugin process communicate via std/out. If this channel is corrupted, for a whatever reason, the dump of the corrupted stream appears in *.dumpstream.

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