Ingo, thanks. I was able to figure out the problem, but those sites didn't actually help. In fact that first site is about 2 1/2 years old and has some outdated information on it. Vogella's page is actually relevant for Neon, and very thorough. He just forgot to point out one very important detail. Actually, the detail is subtly present in a screenshot, but the tutorial text doesn't point it out, and its nature is such that the reader is all but certain to overlook it.
Chapter 11 of Vogella's page tells you how to set up the target platform definition for your RCP application. It tells you to include the two features: Eclipse RCP SDK and Equinox Target Components. In chapter 13, the tutorial describes how to create an SWTBot project and add it to the Tycho build. It highlights that you need to add a couple of SWTBot plugins to your target platform definition. What it doesn't point out, though, is that you need to convert the Eclipse RCP SDK entry into an Eclipse SDK one! It's there in the screenshot, but again, it's not highlighted as a change that you need to make. Given the similarity between the two feature names, the difference is almost unnoticeable.
Without Eclipse SDK in the target platform definition, org.eclipse.ui.ide.application is not available at runtime when the surefire plugin tries to launch the SWTBot headless application. As I mentioned in my original post, the surefire plugin dynamically specifies o.e.ui.ide.application as a dependency if useUIHarness=true. Note that the Eclipse SDK feature is a superset of the Eclipse RCP SDK one (contains it), so you need only specify the former.
That solves that problem...but then you get tripped up by another omission in the tutorial. You MUST specify your RCP product plugin as a dependency in your SWTBot test plugin, even if the test plugin has no build-time dependency on the product one (which it probably doesn't). The reason is that surefire uses the test plugin's dependency list to determine what bundles to load when it launches the SWTBot headless application. If you don't add that dependency to your test plugin, the SWTBot test launch fails with a confusing message: "applicationXMI parameter not set and no branding plugin defined." Good luck making sense of that.
Anyway, I lost quite a few hairs over this, so I figured I'd share.
John
