Injecting @Autowired private field during testing

You can absolutely inject mocks on MyLauncher in your test. I am sure if you show what mocking framework you are using someone would be quick to provide an answer. With mockito I would look into using @RunWith(MockitoJUnitRunner.class) and using annotations for myLauncher. It would look something like what is below.

@RunWith(MockitoJUnitRunner.class)
public class MyLauncherTest
    @InjectMocks
    private MyLauncher myLauncher = new MyLauncher();

    @Mock
    private MyService myService;

    @Test
    public void someTest() {

    }
}

The accepted answer (use MockitoJUnitRunner and @InjectMocks) is great. But if you want something a little more lightweight (no special JUnit runner), and less "magical" (more transparent) especially for occasional use, you could just set the private fields directly using introspection.

If you use Spring, you already have a utility class for this : org.springframework.test.util.ReflectionTestUtils

The use is quite straightforward :

ReflectionTestUtils.setField(myLauncher, "myService", myService);

The first argument is your target bean, the second is the name of the (usually private) field, and the last is the value to inject.

If you don't use Spring, it is quite trivial to implement such a utility method. Here is the code I used before I found this Spring class :

public static void setPrivateField(Object target, String fieldName, Object value){
        try{
            Field privateField = target.getClass().getDeclaredField(fieldName);
            privateField.setAccessible(true);
            privateField.set(target, value);
        }catch(Exception e){
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

Sometimes you can refactor your @Component to use constructor or setter based injection to setup your testcase (you can and still rely on @Autowired). Now, you can create your test entirely without a mocking framework by implementing test stubs instead (e.g. Martin Fowler's MailServiceStub):

@Component
public class MyLauncher {

    private MyService myService;

    @Autowired
    MyLauncher(MyService myService) {
        this.myService = myService;
    }

    // other methods
}

public class MyServiceStub implements MyService {
    // ...
}

public class MyLauncherTest
    private MyLauncher myLauncher;
    private MyServiceStub myServiceStub;

    @Before
    public void setUp() {
        myServiceStub = new MyServiceStub();
        myLauncher = new MyLauncher(myServiceStub);
    }

    @Test
    public void someTest() {

    }
}

This technique especially useful if the test and the class under test is located in the same package because then you can use the default, package-private access modifier to prevent other classes from accessing it. Note that you can still have your production code in src/main/java but your tests in src/main/test directories.

---

If you like Mockito then you will appreciate the MockitoJUnitRunner. It allows you to do "magic" things like @Manuel showed you:

@RunWith(MockitoJUnitRunner.class)
public class MyLauncherTest
    @InjectMocks
    private MyLauncher myLauncher; // no need to call the constructor

    @Mock
    private MyService myService;

    @Test
    public void someTest() {

    }
}

Alternatively, you can use the default JUnit runner and call the MockitoAnnotations.initMocks() in a setUp() method to let Mockito initialize the annotated values. You can find more information in the javadoc of @InjectMocks and in a blog post that I have written.