Pros:

• universal
  • any scenario can be covered with same approach
• standard test harness
  • arquillian is de-facto industry standard
• better coverage
  • more platforms can be covered by one set of tests tests running against different databases
  • testing with various WF/EAP versions for free
• real testing
  • tests ran by continuous integration reveal more real issues than classic unit tests

Cons:

• slower to execute

In order to execute tests faster, there are several strategies that can be employed:

• smoke testing
  • pick some subset of tests that will be run during regular build - mvn clean install
  • the full test suite can be ran as part of continuous integration OR on weekly basis
  • leveraging JUnit categories - e.g. @Smoke
• mocked containers
  • bootstrapping just features that are necessary (e.g. weld container)
• suite-level deployment
  • deploy once per maven module
• developing against remote container
  • minimal deployment-related overhead while testing against real container

For some use cases Arquillian might be the only solution, where architecting own test harness would mean reinventing application server itself:

• JMS