Test annotation without '@Retention(RUNTIME)' annotation

Reports annotations with a SOURCE or CLASS retention policy that are supposed to be used by JUnit 5. Such annotations are not available at runtime and most probably their retention policy should be fixed to be accessible through reflection.

Note that if the retention policy is not specified, then the default retention policy CLASS is used.

Example:

  @Testable
  public @interface UnitTest {}

After the quick-fix is applied:

  @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
  @Testable
  public @interface UnitTest {}

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

MetaAnnotationWithoutRuntimeRetention

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | JUnit

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection MetaAnnotationWithoutRuntimeRetention

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025