Why must jUnit’s fixtureSetup be static?

JUnit always creates one instance of the test class for each @Test method. This is a fundamental design decision to make it easier to write tests without side-effects. Good tests do not have any order-of-run dependencies (see F.I.R.S.T) and creating fresh instances of the test class and its instance variables for each test is crucial in achieving this. Some testing frameworks reuse the same test class instance for all tests, which leads to more possibilities of accidentally creating side-effects between tests.

And because each test method has its own instance, it makes no sense for the @BeforeClass/@AfterClass methods to be instance methods. Otherwise, on which of the test class instances should the methods be called? If it would be possible for the @BeforeClass/@AfterClass methods to reference instance variables, then only one of the @Test methods would have access to those same instance variables – the rest would have the instance variables at their default values – and the @Test method would be randomly selected, because the order of methods in the .class file is unspecified/compiler-dependent (IIRC, Java’s reflection API returns the methods in the same order as they are declared in the .class file, although also that behaviour is unspecified – I have written a library for actually sorting them by their line numbers).

So enforcing those methods to be static is the only reasonable solution.

Here is an example:

public class ExampleTest {

    @BeforeClass
    public static void beforeClass() {
        System.out.println("beforeClass");
    }

    @AfterClass
    public static void afterClass() {
        System.out.println("afterClass");
    }

    @Before
    public void before() {
        System.out.println(this + "\tbefore");
    }

    @After
    public void after() {
        System.out.println(this + "\tafter");
    }

    @Test
    public void test1() {
        System.out.println(this + "\ttest1");
    }

    @Test
    public void test2() {
        System.out.println(this + "\ttest2");
    }

    @Test
    public void test3() {
        System.out.println(this + "\ttest3");
    }
}

Which prints:

beforeClass
ExampleTest@3358fd70    before
ExampleTest@3358fd70    test1
ExampleTest@3358fd70    after
ExampleTest@6293068a    before
ExampleTest@6293068a    test2
ExampleTest@6293068a    after
ExampleTest@22928095    before
ExampleTest@22928095    test3
ExampleTest@22928095    after
afterClass

As you can see, each of the tests is executed with its own instance. What JUnit does is basically the same as this:

ExampleTest.beforeClass();

ExampleTest t1 = new ExampleTest();
t1.before();
t1.test1();
t1.after();

ExampleTest t2 = new ExampleTest();
t2.before();
t2.test2();
t2.after();

ExampleTest t3 = new ExampleTest();
t3.before();
t3.test3();
t3.after();

ExampleTest.afterClass();

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