A.1. Automating Your Tests with Maven

Maven is a popular open source build tool of the Java world, that makes use of practices such as declarative dependencies, standard directories and build life cycles, and convention over configuration to encourage clean, maintainable, high level build scripts. Test automation is strongly supported in Maven. Maven projects use a standard directory structure: it will automatically look for unit tests in a directory called (by default) src/test/java. There is little else to configure: just add a dependency to the test framework (or frameworks) your tests are using, and Maven will automatically look for and execute the JUnit, TestNG, or even Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) tests contained in this directory structure.

In Maven, you run your unit tests by invoking the test life cycle phase, as shown here: