Unrooted Tests

Question

When running all my tests in Eclipse (Eclipse 3.4 'Ganymede'), one test is listed under "Unrooted Tests". I'm using Junit 3.8 and this particular test extends TestCase. I do not see any difference between this test and the other tests. I don't remember seeing this occur in Eclipse 3.3 (Europa).

Clarification:

We haven't moved to JUnit 4.0 yet, so we are not using annotations. I also googled and it seemed like most people were having issues with JUnit 4, but I did not see any solutions. At this point the test passes both locally and in CruiseControl so I'm not overly concerned, but curious.

When I first saw this, though, it was on a failing test that only failed when run with other tests. This led me down the rabbit hole looking for a solution to the "Unrooted" issue that I never found. Eventually I found the culprit in another test that was not properly tearing down.

I agree, it does seem like an Eclipse issue.

Answer 1

Finally I found the solution. The problem is that you are not defining your test cases using annotations but are still doing it the "old way". As soon as you convert over to using annotations you will be able to run one test at a time again.

Here is an example of what a basic test should now look like using annotations:

import static org.junit.Assert.*; // Notice the use of "static" here
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;

public class MyTests { // Notice we don't extent TestCases anymore

  @Before
  public void setUp() { // Note: It is not required to call this setUp()
    // ...
  }

  @Test
  public void doSomeTest() { // Note: method need not be called "testXXX"
    // ...
    assertTrue(1 == 1);
  }
}

Answer 2

I was getting the "unrooted tests" error message as well and it went away magically. I believe it was due to the fact that I was using Eclipse with a Maven project. When I added a new method to my Test class and gave it the @Test annotation, it began getting the error message when I tried to run that one method using the "Run as Junit test" menu option; however, once I ran a maven build the unrooted tests message disappeared and I believe that is the solution to the problem in the future.

Run a maven build because it will refresh the class that JUnit is using.

Answer 3

If your class extends TestCase somewhere in its hierarchy, you have to use the JUnit 3 test runner listed in the drop down under run configurations. Using the JUnit 4 runner (the default I believe) causes that unrooted test phenomenon to occur.