Tests written with the TestNG framework need to be annotated properly in order to be recognized as tests. A Java class will contain methods, that will either be the actual tests, or methods that perform some actions needed within a test. A class or a method that represent a test, will be annotated with the @Test annotation. A method or class that has this annotation needs to have the ‘public’ visibility. Having this in mind, if the @Test annotation is placed at the class level, all the methods within the class that are ‘public’ will be considered tests, and they will execute accordingly (as long as they don’t have one of the before/after annotations described lower in this post, for which there is a specific behavior). All the other methods, that are private or protected, will not be executed. Also, for this particular case, the public methods don’t even need to have the @TestNG annotation. However if you want to add  attributes to some of the test methods, as described in this post , you will need to place the @Test attribute before each test method that will have the attributes. If you desire to place different attributes to test methods, you should put the @Test annotation next to each of these methods, otherwise, you can place the attributes within the class-level @Test annotation. Continue reading TestNG annotations →