Why is the @Test annotation necessary? (Java JUnit)

Question

I was wondering why it is necessary to put @Test above your test methods and what its use is.

Thanks in advance!

It's necessary for JUnit to test. Please see [JUnit Cookbook](http://junit.sourceforge.net/doc/cookbook/cookbook.htm) — Frontear, Jun 09 '19 at 23:25
It tells JUnit which methods are unit tests to be executed in the test harness. — David, Jun 09 '19 at 23:26

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '19 at 23:41

In order to run your unit tests, you have to tell JUnit what the tests are. Usually, you have a lot of tests, so individually listing classes/methods in a configuration file somewhere would become a major headache.

So what the framework does instead is scan all your code for classes that look like tests (using reflection). The old way was to have a defined super-class extends Test and methods following a naming pattern. Now that we have annotations, you use the @Test annotation for that.

Why is the @Test annotation necessary? (Java JUnit)

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