While purely programming language tests work well for small things, I personally find testing things like validation or the model transformations easier with BDD style scenarios and a DSL. Originally I thought that at some point, probably as I work on the validation regular expressions, I'd start to use the cucumberxtexteditor to write feature files to test itself. However this is not possible for the forseable future. It was really tricky to integrate Cucumber into the test project and so I gave up. I think I need to understand all the annotations involved and what's being injected when. Another problem is that the usual mvn test command won't even run the Cucumber tests because of the packaging type plug-in which runs its own test runner etc.