Following on from Bill’s excellent comments, and chats with Geoff and Alan, I agree that there is more than one way to consider JUnit. One is JUnit as a standalone unit testing tool, with some extensions bolted on. The other is JUnit as a framework. As a developer’s unit testing tool, JUnit works very well, and does exactly what it says on the tin. As a framework, it is not ideal. It started life as a Java implementation of the SUnit smalltalk test tool, and has been refactored over time, to the point where it is at least possible to write plug-in extensions, if not necessarily easy.

Alan made the excellent point that JUnit could (should?) be simply a straightforward test framework that makes assertions and fires events. The mechanism of orchestrating the tests and handling the events could be entirely separate. Which would possibly have made SuiteRunner easier to implement as a layer on top of JUnit.