Running single integration test quickly in Grails - testing

Question

Is it possible to quickly run single/all integration test in a class quickly in Grails. The test-app comes with heavy baggage of clearing of all compiled files and generating cobertura reports hence even if we run single integration test, the entire code base is compiled,instrumented and the cobertura report is getting generated. For our application this takes more than 2 minutes.
If it was possible to quickly run one integration test and get a rapid feedbck, it would be immensely helpful.
Also, is it important to clean up all the compiled files once the test is complete? This cleaning is fine if we run the entire set of integration test, but if we are going to run one or two tests in a class this cleaning and re-compiling seems to be a big bottleneck for quicker feedback to developers.
Thanks

Answer 1

If you have an integration test class
class SimpleControllerTests extends GrailsUnitTestCase {
public void testLogin() {}
public void testLogin2() {}
public void testLogin3() {}
}
You can run just one test in this class using:
grails test-app integration: SimpleController.testLogin
However, you will still have to incurr the time penalty required for integration testing (loading config, connecting to DB, instantiating Spring beans, etc.)
If you want your tests to run quickly, then try to write unit tests rather than integration tests.

Answer 2

It is the intention of the integration test to do this whole compiling, data base creation, server starting, etc. because the tests should run in an integrated environment, as the name implies.
Maybe you can extract some tests to unit tests. These you can run in Eclipse.
You can switch off Cobertura by placing the following code in your grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy:
coverage {
enabledByDefault = false
}

Answer 3

Like you stated, the majority of time is setting up the application environment, injecting beans and doing the dynamic class annotations. You can speed up your integration test cycle by only loading this once, by running your tests in the grails REPL.
However, the tradeoff is that there are dynamic reloading issues in the REPL. If you see random weirdness, exit the REPL and reload.
$> ./grailsw --plain-output
|Loading Grails 2.5.3
|Configuring classpath
|Enter a script name to run. Use TAB for completion:
grails> test-app -integration
... (loads some things)
...
grails> test-app -integration
... (faster loading)
And to reply to the other commenters - integration tests are useful as well, there is some code that cannot be tested with a unit test (for instance, testing HQL or SQL queries).