Should I care about Junit redundancy when using setUp() with @Before annotation?

Posted by c_maker on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by c_maker
Published on 2012-02-29T01:56:20Z Indexed on 2012/04/15 17:48 UTC
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Even though developers have switched from junit 3.x to 4.x I still see the following 99% of the time:

@Before
public void setUp(){/*some setup code*/}

@After
public void tearDown(){/*some clean up code*/}

Just to clarify my point... in Junit 4.x, when the runners are set up correctly, the framework will pick up the @Before and @After annotations no matter the method name. So why do developers keep using the same conventional junit 3.x names? Is there any harm keeping the old names while also using the annotations (other than it makes me feel like devs do not know how this really works and just in case, use the same name AND annotate as well)?

Is there any harm in changing the names to something maybe more meaningful, like eachTestMethod() (which looks great with @Before since it reads 'before each test method') or initializeEachTestMethod()?

What do you do and why?

I know this is a tiny thing (and may probably be even unimportant to some), but it is always in the back of my mind when I write a test and see this. I want to either follow this pattern or not but I want to know why I am doing it and not just because 99% of my fellow developers do it as well.

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