I agree with Tim that a unit test should load it. But that being said, it won't test everything because unit test will detect problems involving the beans that you try to load in your test . The best way i found to test the configuration is using JUnit with an open-source project called
Beanoh and it's in
github it was extremely easy to use
e.g.
and this basically will go through all the beans defined in a bootstrap spring context (by default it looks for com.somepackage.SomeTest-BeanohContext.xml ) and one by one it attempts to load them which will throw an exception if spring cannot load the beans correctly .... Beanoh also has another test for @component annotated classes and detecting duplicate bean ids ... really helpful
