I wrote a small groovy script to to do some maintenance tasks on my machine. At some point the logic got a little bit more complicated and I decided to write some simple testcases. I executed the testscript and was really surprised about the output: the test should fail but it didn‘t! Now I tried to nail it down with limiting the scope to a very simple method call but the result was exactly the same. Hm, I thought it must have something todo with log4j that I used to write everything into the logfile. So I removed the log4j dependency and started the tests again. To my surprise the result didn‘t change at all. There was no output from junit on the console. I started to look a little bit closer at the class and walked through the constructor call to the method that I called during my test. Bang! There is was! In the constructor I checked for the existence of a certain resource (in this case a mounted volume). If the volume wasn‘t mounted I terminated the script with System.exit(1). I guess this was a really bad idea. Now I changed it to throw new RuntimeException(‘Volume not mounted‘) and everything is fine again.
Lesson learned: Never call System.exit(1) in constructor calls!
