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Quick Tip: Run Only Specific Tests in Your Build Pipeline with JUnit Tags

ByRobin Rowinski

At work, I recently had the task to make our build pipeline run only a subset of tests — basically, to skip long-running or low-priority cases.

At first, I went down the Spring Boot @EnabledIf route. It works, but honestly, it’s overkill for this use case. Turns out there’s a much simpler and more elegant way: JUnit Tags.

Tagging Tests

You can tag entire test classes or individual test methods using @Tag().

Example:

@Tag("prio")
class TestA {
    // all tests in here are part of "prio"
}


Or tag specific methods:

class TestB {
    @Tag("prio")
    @Test
    void fastCase() {}

    @Test
    void slowCase() {}
}

Run Only Tagged Tests

To execute only the tests you tagged (in this case, with prio), just update your build pipeline to include the following Maven option:

mvn test -Dgroups=prio


That’s it — Maven will only run the tagged tests.

Why It’s Great

  • Super simple, no framework-specific hacks.
  • Works out of the box with JUnit 5.
  • Easy to manage test categories (e.g. fast, integration, flaky).

No extra annotations, no YAML magic. Just clean, native JUnit Tags.

Happy testing.

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