Grails Unit Testing not agile

Don't be surprised if you give Grails unit testing a try. I've done that recently and must say it is not agile at all. At least not yet (Grails 0.5).

As for now, it takes approximately 25 sec on a pretty fast box (my PC is a 3.2 GHz Dual Core with 2GB RAM, Os WinXp) to run a single unit test. Why so long? Surely, unit tests should run faster.

Update: I've just run grails test-app on my new Ubuntu 7.04. To my surprise, a single unit test run takes only 17 sec. That's a big difference comparing to 25 sec on WinXp.

I have found the answer on the grails user group. Graeme Rocher, the project lead of Grails, in reply to a similar issue says:

"We're separating out unit and integration tests so that unt tests will
run quicker. At the moment every test is an integration test, hence
why it takes long to bootstrap" (Graeme's post)

The slow unit testing should be improved in Grails 0.5.5, as Graeme is working on improvements to that. Can't wait to try this out as TDD on Grails can be really exciting then!

Apart from that there is another small issue, though. Some have already experienced that (see this post on the grails-user group), too. If a unit test fails it does not tell you what went wrong. All you can see is the 'test failed' message. Quite confusing, especially if you are used to JUnit's detailed error messages.

Luckily, you can find the cause. Again, the grails-user group is where I've found the answer. The detailed test reports sit under target/test-reports folder. They are available in different formats, including plain text, xml and html. You can find the detailed message there, plus a very long stack trace ;-) The only trouble is that you waste even more time finding the cause of a unit test failure...

And here I can give one hint that makes it faster. If you open one of the detailed reports in a text editor that checks for file modifications, it would reload the report automatically after each test run ;-)