Improve and streamline testcase development in Jetspeed

I want to make it easier on us to write high-performance test cases against Jetspeed components. Currently we rely on sections of and in some cases the entire Jetspeed Spring engine to initialize and run our tests. I have read articles advising * NOT * to use this approach inside your test cases and that you should hand-assemble the components within the test cases themselves. We also have some clunky test case inheritance hierarchies (I will take the blame for that) that initialize more than we need in most cases. What I am doing to solve this is to, instead of using abstract test cases, put together small set "TestHelper" components that have there own setUp(0 and tearDown() methods that perform specific functions such as initialize a datasource pool and properly initializing OJB, etc. The datasource and OJB helpers are already in place and I have them working in the registry tests with very little change to the test cases themselves.