Gotcha: JUnit tests fail on Eclipse with a mysterious Xerces error

I had a strange problem occurring with some JUnit tests

java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.apache.xerces.dom.DeferredElementImpl.getTextContent()Ljava/lang/String;

at com.whirlycott.cache.CacheManager.configure(Unknown Source)

at com.whirlycott.cache.CacheManager.(Unknown Source)

at com.whirlycott.cache.CacheManager.(Unknown Source)

…

Turns out that if you have Commons Configuration specified in your Maven POM, you’ll get this error. You need to specify this in pom.xml:

commons-configuration
commons-configuration
1.1
compile


xerces
xerces


 **[augmentation implants breast gummy bear](http://www.cccmz.de/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/breast-augmentation-gummy-bear-implants.html)** 

… and specify xercesImpl 2.6.2 as a dependency. Things will work again.