Using the Maven Surefire plugin to run unit tests

A best practice of software development is writing automated unit tests for the code that you develop. Let us now see how to run these tests.

The plugin that does this job is the Maven Surefire plugin.

How to do it...

To run unit tests using the Maven Surefire plugin, perform the following steps:

1. Open the command prompt.

2. Run the following command on one of our sample projects:

   mvn test
   

3. Observe the various steps that get executed:

   [INFO] --- maven-surefire-plugin:2.10:test (default-test) @ simple-project ---
   [INFO] Surefire report directory: C:\projects\apache-maven-cookbook\simple-project\target\surefire-reports
   -------------------------------------------------------
    T E S T S
   -------------------------------------------------------
   Running com.packt.cookbook.AppTest
   Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0 sec
   Results:
   Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0
   

How it works...

The test parameter indicates the invocation...