Part 3. JUnit and the build process

This part of the book deals with a very important aspect in the development cycle of every project: the build process. The importance of the build process is reconsidered more often these days, especially in large projects. That’s why we dedicate a whole part of this book to integration between JUnit and two of the most important build tools: Ant and Maven.

The ninth chapter gives you a quick introduction to Ant and its terminology: tasks, targets, and builds. We discuss how to start your tests as part of your Ant build lifecycle, and we also show how to produce some fancy reports with the results of the JUnit execution. This chapter serves as a basis for most of the rest of the book, because you need a good knowledge of Ant to be able to grasp all of the Ant integration sections in the latter chapters.

The tenth chapter guides you through the same concepts, but this time by means of another popular tool called Maven. We show you how to include the execution of your tests in the Maven build lifecycle and how to produce nice HTML reports by means of some of the Maven plug-ins.

The last chapter in this part of the book is devoted to continuous integration (CI) tools. This practice is highly recommended by extreme programmers and helps you maintain a code repository and automate the build on it. This is helpful in building large projects that depend on several other projects that change often (as any open source project does).