It works as expected. In your test case there are two isolated bean archives: target/classes and target/test-classes. And the alternative is only selected for the latter. Bean archive isolation is supported (and enabled by default) from version 2.2.0.Final. Previous versions only operated with the "flat" deployment structure (that's why it works on 2.1). You could either select the alternative globally or disable the isolation by means of a system property org.jboss.weld.se.archive.isolation. See also 18.4.5. Bean Archive Isolation.