Enforce messages for ignored JUnit tests

During the last days two posts Find JUnit assertions without a message and Find JUnit tests without assertions have been published here about useful rules regarding proper usage of JUnit.

Now a colleague came up with the hint that it would be very useful to ensure that every occurrence of the annotation @org.junit.Ignore shall provide a message why a particular test class or method is ignored:

  @Ignore // No message is provided
  public void test1() {
    ...
  }

  @Ignore("Requires fix for ticket XYZ.")
  public void test2() {
    ...
  }

The method „test1“ does not provide any context information why it has been disabled whereas „test2“ does. Thus for setting up a rule we need to find all annotations of type @org.junit.Ignore which do not have an attribute value named „value“:

<jqa:jqassistant-rules
  xmlns:jqa="http://www.buschmais.com/jqassistant/core/analysis/rules/schema/v1.0">

    <constraint id="junit4:IgnoreWithoutMessage">
        <description>All @Ignore annotations must provide a message.</description>
        <cypher><![CDATA[
            match
              (e)-[:ANNOTATED_BY]->(ignore:Annotation)-[:OF_TYPE]->(ignoreType:Type)
            where
              ignoreType.fqn= "org.junit.Ignore"
              and not (ignore)-[:HAS]->(:Value{name:"value"})
            return
              e as IgnoreWithoutMessage
        ]]></cypher>
    </constraint>

</jqa:jqassistant-rules>

So this is another candidate for the jQAssistant JUnit4 plugin.