Reflecting on STF support and looking ahead Aug 2, 2026

This post is part of the series on my work on JUnit supported by the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF). Please refer to the initial post for context and a list of all posts.

Thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), I was able to work full-time on JUnit for about 16 months in 2024 and 2025. It’s time to reflect and assess whether that effort really did improve the long-term sustainability of the project. Moreover, I’ll share a look ahead at what’s next for me and for JUnit.

Looking back

The stated mission of the Sovereign Tech Agency, which manages the STF, is “sustainably strengthening the open source ecosystem”. To judge whether its investment has paid off, let’s take a look at the list of delivered milestones:

I won’t go into detail on each of them here but want to highlight a few things that stand out to me. Investing time in Open Test Reporting (M2) has sparked a new collaboration with Sebastian Bergmann from PHPUnit. It has also attracted new contributors who improved the HTML report and event processing. Having Renovate set up (M1) and reliable release automation (M3) lets the JUnit team focus on more important things. Improving Kotlin support (M6) and adopting Antora (M10) for documentation have helped create an influx of contributions providing Kotlin equivalents for all code snippets. Last but not least, the collaboration on the new parallel execution infrastructure (M8) has brought us a new core team member in Rien Korstanje. Therefore, my verdict is clear: yes, the STF’s investment was a huge win for JUnit and – due to Open Test Reporting – automated testing in general.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed being able to focus on JUnit for such an extended period of time and finally address some long-standing issues. After I finished the last milestone, the transition back to being a part-time maintainer was frustrating, at least at first. I had to accept that I wouldn’t be able to respond to new issues right away and – in some weeks – would have to let notifications pile up again.

Looking forward

Starting out as a consultant

So, what’s next for me? Toward the end of my STF engagement, I decided that I would give freelance consulting a try. My goal was to take the knowledge and experience I’ve gathered from working on JUnit, Gradle, and Develocity and bring it to other teams. Whether it’s improving their software delivery performance, getting the most out of JUnit, or working successfully with open source, I want to help them set themselves up for success. Over the past months, I was also able to gain some experience in digital sovereignty and would love to support others with it.

My first engagement as a consultant started at the end of 2025 and is still ongoing. I’m helping a client reduce the flakiness of their test suite, speed up their Gradle build, improve their CI pipelines, and modernize their dependency management. If you’re also interested in working with me, feel free to reach out!

TestLens

Last year, I started another project with two fellow ex-Gradlers: Benedikt Ritter and Jendrik Johannes. Together, we have created TestLens, a GitHub app that provides you with the reporting and tools to track down and fix flaky tests right from the GitHub UI. TestLens is now generally available and can be installed directly from the GitHub Marketplace.

Support & Care for JUnit

Of course, JUnit will continue to be a big part of my life. From now on, I want to set aside at least one day a week to work on it. In cooperation with Open Elements, we’ve kicked off another initiative that would allow for more time on the project and make maintaining it much more sustainable: Support & Care. A support subscription provides organizations with advice directly from the maintainers of the participating open source projects: Eclipse Temurin, Apache Maven, Apache Log4j, Apache Commons, and JUnit. Every unused support hour goes back to working on the respective project.

With this post, the series on my STF-supported work comes to an end. Looking back, I’m truly grateful to the STF for enabling me to work on JUnit full-time. Looking forward, between consulting, TestLens, and Support & Care, I’m excited about this next chapter – and curious where it will take me!