While developing the new test-runner and this SmallLint extension I struggled with SUnit several times. Even-tough there are always ways to subclass and configure it to suit special needs, it gets very soon ugly and cumbersome.
It would be good to fix that. Sunit is not curved on a stone.
After 3 years of not having touched Java, I decided to have a quick look at JUnit 4 [1] and I must say that they changed a lot to the positive.
I look at I have the impression that this is rather complex. With the after before ( I can understand that you want to have a setup shared by a bunch of tests of the same test case but more...) I think that the descriptions in SUnit are good.
It makes me sad to see that SUnit still looks more or less the same as the first time I've used it about 4 years ago. We should really try to improve it! Imagine a newbie coming from Java and seeing a testing-framework looks like JUnit 1.0 :-/
I have the impression that he would be scared now that I got a look at it. Can you tell us what you liked? It seems to me that annotations could help us there but annotation should only be used to convey optimization (sharing or failure expected...) else the tests would lose their values when porting application between dialects.
A new test runner should be the second step (I've done that already, because the old one was simply causing too much pain), an improved test-model should be the first step! ;-)
Lukas
[1] http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc_40
-- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch