The only thing you can say in JUnit is that this test is part of that suite. My tests have several aspects that I'm interesting in using for triggering. Sometimes I want to run all DB tests, regardless of which suite they're in. That's what I mean by strict hierarchies. Part of the point I'm trying to make here is that once you've written a couple of test suites, you probably have a pretty good idea what tools you would prefer; and it's totally OK to dive in and have a go; there is nothing sacred or magic about test frameworks that rules out rolling your own. When it comes to test frameworks, most of what I've seen so far is over-engineered crap in my eyes; that is my authentic experience from 32 years of writing code in umpteen languages.