Mark unit test as an expected failure in JUnit4

Question

Is there an extension for JUnit4 which allows for marking some tests as "expected to fail"?

I would like to mark the test for current features under development with some tag, for instance @wip. For these tests I would like to ensure that they are failing.

My acceptance criteria:

Scenario: A successful test tagged @wip is recorded as failure
    Given a successful test marked @wip
    When the test is executed
    Then the test is recorded as failure.

Scenario: A failing test tagged @wip is recorded as fine
    Given a failing test tagged @wip
    When the test is executed
    Then the test is recorded as fine.

Scenario: A successful test not tagged @wip is recorded as fine
    Given a successful test not tagged @wip
    When the test is executed
    Then the test is recorded as successful.

Scenario: A failing test not tagged with @wip is recorded as failure
    Given a failing test not tagged with @wip
    When the test is executed
    Then the test is recorded as failure.

Answer 1

Short answer, no extension will do that as far as I know and in my opinion it would defeat the whole purpose of JUnit if it would exist.

Longer answer, red/green is kind of sacred and circumventing it shouldn't become a habit. What if you accidentally forgot to remove the circumvention and assume that all tests passed?

You could make it expect an AssertionError or Exception.

@wip
@Test(expected=AssertionError.class)
public void wipTest() {
   fail("work in progress");
}

Making a shortcut in your IDE for that shouldn't be too hard. Of course I was assuming you tag the test with an annotation in the source code.

In my opinion what you are asking is against JUnit's purpose, but I do understand the use for it.

An alternative would be to implement a WIPRunner with the WIP annotation and somehow make it accept failures of tests with the WIP annotation.

If you are integrating with a BDD framework I would suggest a way to let it run the unit tests you marked @wip seperately and decide within your BDD methods if the result is ok.