JUnit Malformed Declaration

ID

java.junit_malformed_declaration

Severity

low

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Reliability

Language

Java

Tags

best-practice, junit, testing

Description

Reports @Test methods that violate JUnit’s declaration requirements: private or static modifiers, parameters without @ParameterizedTest, or a non-void return type in JUnit 5. Such methods are silently ignored by the test runner and never execute.

Rationale

Reliability — The malformed test method will not be picked up by the test runner, giving a false sense of test coverage.

Remediation

Non-compliant code

@Test
private void testSomething() { }

@Test
static void testStatic() { }

@Test
void testWithParam(String input) { }

Compliant code

@Test
void testSomething() { }

@ParameterizedTest
@ValueSource(strings = {"a", "b"})
void testWithParam(String input) { }

References