You don't need to lookup the bean, we can provide a feature to autowire beans in a test class by using reflection. please take a look at AbstractSpringInjectionEnricher.java registerBean method

Add Spring StaticApplicationContext ----------------------------------- Key: ARQ-1303 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ARQ-1303 Project: Arquillian Issue Type: Enhancement Security Level: Public(Everyone can see) Components: Extension - Spring Reporter: omid pourhadi Assignee: Marius Bogoevici Priority: Minor Original Estimate: 1 week, 1 day Remaining Estimate: 1 week, 1 day It is a common way that developers programmatically register beans into context specially in testing rather than reading bean definitions from external configuration sources, in this case, you need to use StaticApplicationContext. As far as my experience concerned, there are some circumstances that you need to have populated context when you are testing 1. for registering mock objects into context let's assume we inject a DAO into a service and we want to mock DAO then test our service {code:title=Bar.java|borderStyle=solid} public class MockTest(){ @Mock Dao dao; public void testMethod(){ ctx.getBeanFactory().registerSingleton(dao.getClass().getName(), dao); } } {code} 2. for specifying classes not packages sometimes you need to create a spring context by only some specific classes from different packages not the whole packages. It might be good idea to have an annotation ClassToScan({}) to define whcih classes, you want to scan