Spring AutoMock is a test enabling framework to allow automatic exposure of Mocked beans for a Spring application. Used in conjunction with Spring autowiring of bean dependencies you can develop teired application contexts that represent the architectural tiers of your application, and thus you testing strategy. The simplest example is a separation of service beans and DAO beans into separate xml application contexts so that the services can be fully tested in isolation of the DAOs. The DAO beans are still required by the services typically as an injected property. Spring AutoMock can automatically register a Mock and a proxy of certain beans, so that the Mocks can be injected into your test cases and the matching proxy into the item under test. This reduces the need for repeated Spring test configuration.