My understanding is that there were a couple reasons for the change - 1) Arquillian has better support for JUnit than for TestNG and 2) JUnit is more up to date than earlier versions like 3.x (e.g., annotation driven). hawkular-metrics does not use Arquillian so I do not care about 1) and 2) is not much of a reason. Unless JUnit provides similar capabilities, I prefer to keep integration/functional tests in TestNG for hawkular-metrics.