Is there a way to "fail fast" for junit with the maven surefire plugin?

Question

I'm currently working on a java project using maven. We use the maven surefire plugin to run our junit suite as part of the build process.

Our test suite is rapidly growing, in both coverage and execution time. The execution time is very frustrating and time consuming when you end up waiting ten minutes to find out that a test failed in the first minute of testing.

I would like to find a way to make the build process fail upon the first error/failure in the test suite. I know that this is possible for other build tools, but I have been unable to find a way to do this with maven surefire.

I know that there is an unresolved ticket for this functionality in the surefire jira, but I'm hoping that there is an existing solution out there for this.

Answer 1

As far as I know, no, and this really requires the resolution of SUREFIRE-580. If you want to make this happen faster, you should at least vote for the issue and, optionally, submit a patch ;)

Answer 2

This doesn't solve the question exactly, but the solution that my workplace ultimately came up with was to use Atlassian's Clover to run specialized builds of just tests pertaining to changed code.

We have a Clover build that runs the tests for the changed codes and in turn kicks off the full test build.

This has proven to be a satisfactory solution.