Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Behind the scenes of JUnit 5 – running an indep...

Behind the scenes of JUnit 5 – running an independent open source project by example

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I had the first discussions about how to keep evolving JUnit at conferences. I had been a maintainer for JUnit for 2 years and recently been promoted to ”keeper of the green bar,“ i.e., project/team lead of the project. While being a wildly popular testing framework, maintaining JUnit was challenging due to IDEs, build tools, and third-party extensions relying on implementation details. Plus, I felt I never had enough time to even work through my GitHub notifications.

As I shared these frustrations with fellow developers at conferences, the idea arose to start a crowdfunding campaign to have actual dedicated time to solve the underlying issues. The campaign launched a few months later and came to a successful conclusion in September 2015. We formed a team, had a kickoff with relevant stakeholders (IDEs, build tools, …), and set to work. Finally, six weeks of time to work on JUnit! As you can imagine, that time passed relatively quickly and the project was far from finished. Despite that we eventually released JUnit 5.0 in September 2017. But development didn’t stop there and has kept going since. In this talk, I will share insights about the most important factors for keeping the project running successfully. It should be interesting for anyone contributing to open source projects or aspiring to do so as well as other committers/maintainers.

Marc Philipp

October 22, 2024
Tweet

More Decks by Marc Philipp

Other Decks in Programming

Transcript