So what I am looking for is a troubleshooting methodology.

The problem I have is as follows:

1. I have a simple unit test that checks to see if spring is wiring the entity manager into my DAO. It also checks to see if spring is wiring the target test object. Why test a DAO with a live entity manager in it instead of a mock. Simple, I do it this way before creating the mock in order to have the tests written first. Then I go back and remove the live entity manager and replace it with a mock. This way I know exactly how it is supposed to behave.