[m2e-users] m2e-wtp, handling JUnit tests the "right" way?

[Kristian Rink <kawazu428@xxxxxxxxx>]

Folks;

using Eclipse 4.3 and the m2e tooling that comes bundled with it, I am 
in some way lost setting things right to run JUnit tests from within the 
IDE. These are somewhat more complex maven war builds, yet they work. My 
experience so far:

- Adding a JUnit test to "src/test/java" and _immediately_ trying to run 
will fail almost for sure. At the very least I have to do a "mvn 
package" on the project(s) to be able to run the code.

- Changing an existing JUnit test and trying to run it, initially will 
result in the IDE spending quite some time doing building local 
dependencies that wouldn't be required to be rebuilt because they didn't 
changed ("Scoped incremental build..."). Sometimes, after that, test 
runs well, sometimes the IDE just complains about "The archive: 
/<project>/target/test-classes which is referenced by the classpath, 
does not exist."

- Overally, if I finally manage to run a JUnit test this way, it almost 
for sure will be the code that used to be in there during the last "mvn 
package" run... Sometimes, after that, the test will run. Sometimes, 
I'll just again run into ClassNotFoundException.

This feels rather ... difficult, ending me up with 2..5 minutes to even 
run a simple test, which is considerably too long. Is there any way to 
set this so it works the way one would assume it should (in terms of 
speed, too)? That's not really fun at the moment, not talking about 
being productive... :/

TIA and all the best,
Kristian