Test method without assertions

Reports test methods that do not contain any assertions. Such methods may indicate either incomplete or weak test cases.

Example:

  public class ExtensiveTest {

    @Test
    public void testAlive() {
      System.out.println("nothing");
    }
  }

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.

TestMethodWithoutAssertion

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 | JVM languages | Test frameworks

Configure the inspection:

Use the table to specify the combinations of fully qualified class name and method name regular expression that should qualify as assertions. Class names also match subclasses.
Use the 'assert' keyword is considered an assertion option to specify if the Java assert statements using the assert keyword should be considered an assertion.
Use the Ignore test methods which declare exceptions option to ignore the test methods that declare exceptions. This can be useful when you have tests that will throw an exception on failure and thus don't need any assertions.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Test method without assertions inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Assertion methods: Default value:
None
'assert' keyword is considered an assertion: Default value:
Not selected
Ignore test methods which declare exceptions: Default value:
Not selected

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 TestMethodWithoutAssertion

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