JUnit vs TestNG [closed]

Question

I've used both, but I have to agree with Justin Standard that you shouldn't really consider rewriting your existing tests to any new format. Regardless of the decision, it is pretty trivial to run both. TestNG strives to be much more configurable than JUnit, but in the end they both work equally well.

TestNG has a neat feature where you can mark tests as a particular group, and then easily run all tests of a specific group, or exclude tests of a particular group. Thus you can mark tests that run slowly as in the "slow" group and then ignore them when you want quick results. A suggestion from their documentation is to mark some subset as "checkin" tests which should be run whenever you check new files in. I never saw such a feature in JUnit, but then again, if you don't have it, you don't REALLY miss it.

For all its claims of high configuration, I did run into a corner case the a couple weeks ago where I couldn't do what I wanted to do... I wish I could remember what it is, but I wanted to bring it up so you know that it's not perfect.

The biggest advantage TestNG has is annotations... which JUnit added in version 4 anyways.

First I would say, don't rewrite all your tests just to suit the latest fad. Junit3 works perfectly well, and the introduction of annotations in 4 doesn't buy you very much (in my opinion). It is much more important that you guys write tests, and it sounds like you do.

Use whatever seems most natural and helps you get your work done.

I can't comment on TestNG b/c I haven't used it. But I would recommend unitils, a great wrapper for JUnit/TestNG/DBUnit/EasyMock, regardless of which route you take. (It supports all the flavors mentioned above)

TestNG's biggest draw cards for me include its support test groups, and more importantly - test group dependencies (marking a test as being dependent of a group causes the tests to simply skip running when the dependent group fails).

TestNG's other big draw cards for me include test parameters, data providers, annotation transformers, and more than anything - the vibrant and responsive user community.

Whilst on the surface one might not think all of TestNGs features above might not be needed, once you start to understand the flexibility bring to your tests, you'll wonder how you coped with JUnit.

(disclaimer - I've not used JUnit 4.x at all, so am unable to really comment on advances or new features there).

About a year ago, we had the same problem. I spent sometime considering which move was better, and eventually we realized that TestNG has no 'killer features'. It's nice, and has some features JUnit 4 doesn't have, but we don't need them.
We didn't want people to feel uncomfortable writing tests while getting to know TestNG because we wanted them to keep writing a lot of tests.
Also, JUnit is pretty much the de-facto standard in the Java world. There's no decent tool that doesn't support it from the box, you can find a lot of help on the web and they added a lot of new features in the past year which shows it's alive.

We decided to stick with JUnit and never looked back.