JUnit: pause for user input

Question

I'm learning JUnit. Since my app includes graphical output, I want the ability to eyeball the output and manually pass or fail the test based on what I see. It should wait for me for a while, then fail if it times out.

Is there a way to do this within JUnit (or its extensions), or should I just throw up a dialog box and assertTrue on the output? It seems like it might be a common problem with an existing solution.

Edit: If I shouldn't be using JUnit for this, what should I be using? I want to manually verify the build every so often, and unit test automatically, and it'd be great if the two testing frameworks got along.

Answer 1

Manually accepting/rejecting a test defeats the purpose of using an automated test framework. JUnit is not made for this kind of stuff. Unless you find a way to create and inject a mockup of the object representing your output device, you should consider alternatives (don't really know any there sorry).

I once wrote automated tests for a video decoding component. I dumped the decoded data to a file using some other decoder as a reference, and then compared the output of my decoder to that using the PSNR of each pair of images. This is not 100% self contained (needs external files as resources), but was automated at least, and worked fine for me.