Spring ApplicationContext not cached for integration testing with Maven

Question

When integration tests start from IDE ApllicationContext loads only once and then shared between tests and it works as aspected. But executing mvn clean install new ApllicationContext created per every test. According Spring doc I've configured maven-failsafe-plugin to use single fork

<artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
 <version>2.12.4</version>
 <configuration>
    <forkCount>1</forkCount>
    <reuseForks>true</reuseForks>
...

To cache ApplicationContext used followin annotation:

@ContextConfiguration(classes = TestConfig.class)

Why context not shared when building application with maven? Actually is there is any other way speed up IT tests? Thanks.

UPDATED:

This is multimodule Maven project. Accordig Spring IT caching doc

To benefit from the caching mechanism, all tests must run within the same process or test suite. This can be achieved by executing all tests as a group within an IDE. Similarly, when executing tests with a build framework such as Ant, Maven, or Gradle it is important to make sure that the build framework does not fork between tests. For example, if the forkMode for the Maven Surefire plug-in is set to always or pertest, the TestContext framework will not be able to cache application contexts between test classes and the build process will run significantly slower as a result.

So for maven-failsafe-plugin 2.14 this config equals forkMode=once

Answer 1

Few things you may want to look into:

• version of the surefire plugin and the parallel execution configuration. According to the Surefire Fork Options - the forkCount and reuseForks are parameters for Surefire version 2.14 or later. The pom file snippet in OP states version 2.12.4
• there seems to be something in your configuration that still causes parallel execution. In the case where 20 threads are launched, I expect that 20 application contexts are created and cached, so that all the tests executed by one thread are (re)-using the application context created for it. If that is the case, the behavior is expected in the context of multiple threads running tests - the question becomes adjusting the configuration to the number of threads desired
• may want to experiment with various versions of Surefire, the behavior of parallel execution may differ. I've used Surefire 2.16 in other projects and without any custom configuration related to forking, all tests are executed single threaded (as the default configuration states it should)

I know this is rather a list of more things to try than a definitive answer to the OP, but I posted in the hope it might be helpful

Answer 2

You can try with specifiyng context location instead of classes:

@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath:test-context.xml")

Spring caches application contexts by locations attribute so if the same locations appears for the second time, Spring uses the same context rather than creating a new one.

It's from here: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/testing.html#testing-ctx-management

Also you can read about speeding up unit tests here: http://www.nurkiewicz.com/2010/12/speeding-up-spring-integration-tests.html

UPDATE

Is your project a multi module Maven project? Accordingly to the docs:

The default setting is forkCount=1/reuseForks=true, which means that Surefire creates one new JVM process to execute all tests in one maven module.