On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Lie Ryan <lie.1...@gmail.com> wrote: > That unittest executes its tests in alphabetical order is implementation > detail for a very good reason, and good unittest practice dictates that > execution order should never be defined (some even argued that the execution > order should be randomized). If the test runner turns out to execute tests > concurrently, that should not cause problems for a well-designed test. > Displaying the test results in a more convenient order for viewing is what > you really wanted in 99.99% of the cases.
Randomizing the order is not a bad idea, but you also need to be able to run the tests in a consistent order, from a specific random seed. In the real world, test conflicts and dependencies do happen, and if we observe a failure, make a change, rerun the tests and observe success, we need to be able to be sure that we actually fixed the bug, and that it didn't pass only because it was run in a different order. Concurrent testing is a bad idea for this reason -- it's not repeatable (testing concurrency, OTOH, is a perfectly fine thing to be thinking about). Cheers, Ian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
