The JVM will always have a value for some predefined system properties, such as java.version which represents the running JDK version, and so on. The complete list is available in the JavaDoc for System::getProperties. Guava defines an enum called StandardSystemProperty which contains an entry for each of these predefined values. All these entries have a method value which delegates to the System class. For instance you can do: assertEquals("andry", StandardSystemProperty.USER_NAME.value()); ...