how is junit related to maven sure fire plugin

Question

I am fairly new to writing Maven pom files and JUnit tests. I have following in my pom and it is calling my test scripts as expected.

  <plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.16</version>
 </plugin>

It seems JUnit is more popular than sure fire plugin.

1) How is JUnit similar/different from maven sure fire plugin's default behavior (that is working for me from above plugin configuration). I can imagine JUnit having additional API/library; but what do they give me in addition to sure fire plugin

2)what is the easiest way to change my current tests that are running with sure fire plugin to JUnit. I came across following link which sort of implies that adding few lines to pom would be sufficient (?) http://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/examples/junit.html

3)about previous bullet, what benefits would I have if I convert sure fire plugin tests to JUnit.

Hopefully, I am unambiguous (with my intro background to maven and JUnit)

Answer 1

maven-surefire-plugin is not itself a test framework: it's a Maven plugin that will run tests written with a test framework, either JUnit or TestNG.

I have following in my pom and it is calling my test scripts as expected.

If this is already running your tests then, as Surefire only knows about those two test frameworks, it means you're already using either JUnit or TestNG. You should be able to tell which from the classes you're importing to write your test classes.

(that is working for me from above plugin configuration)

Unless you have a particular requirement there's little reason to move away from the framework you're already using; it doesn't sound like you need to change anything.

Answer 2

As it says right here:

To get started with JUnit, you need to add the required version of JUnit to your project ... This is the only step that is required to get started - you can now create tests in your test source directory (eg, src/test/java).

Your question is confusing and suggests you haven't done any preliminary research yet. When you say "surefire tests" you may mean Pojo tests. If you know what a JUnit test is, it's pretty common sense thing to convert the Pojo tests to JUnit tests. Just put @Test before the Pojo test methods. You may also want to convert assert into the appropriate JUnit assert methods. In summary, just read a JUnit tutorial and the rest will be straight forward.