[Tech] Kent Beck's JUnit Max

JUnit is a testing-framework well known to every Java developer (according ports to other languages exist). Kent Beck and Erich Gamma were the core-developers of JUnit, which was published around 2000 as Open-Source framework. It is fair to say, that JUnit and its ports had a huge influence on quality assurance and can be found in nearly every modern software project.

Now Kent Beck announced a new project JUnit Max. The core concept is "continuous testing". JUnit Max is an Eclipse plugin that starts the unit test execution everytime a class is saved and controls the test-execution ordering according to the classes that are worked on and tests that have failed recently.

In my opinion this seems to be an interesting and logical next step in unit-testing-frameworks. JUnit Max however is not Open Source and follows (in my opinion) a rather strange license model (more can be found on the website). I wonder, whether the additional benefit justifies the license fees and this particular model and more important, how long it will take until this functionality is provided by an Open Source solution...