NUnit Test Run Order

Question

I just want to point out that while most of the responders assumed these were unit tests, the question did not specify that they were.

nUnit is a great tool that can be used for a variety of testing situations. I can see appropriate reasons for wanting to control test order.

In those situations I have had to resort to incorporating a run order into the test name. It would be great to be able to specify run order using an attribute.

NUnit 3.2.0 added an OrderAttribute, see:

https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/Order-Attribute

Example:

public class MyFixture
{
    [Test, Order(1)]
    public void TestA() { ... }


    [Test, Order(2)]
    public void TestB() { ... }

    [Test]
    public void TestC() { ... }
}

Your unit tests should each be able to run independently and stand alone. If they satisfy this criterion then the order does not matter.

There are occasions however where you will want to run certain tests first. A typical example is in a Continuous Integration situation where some tests are longer running than others. We use the category attribute so that we can run the tests which use mocking ahead of the tests which use the database.

i.e. put this at the start of your quick tests

[Category("QuickTests")]

Where you have tests which are dependant on certain environmental conditions, consider the TestFixtureSetUp and TestFixtureTearDown attributes, which allow you to mark methods to be executed before and after your tests.

Wanting the tests to run in a specific order does not mean that the tests are dependent on each other - I'm working on a TDD project at the moment, and being a good TDDer I've mocked/stubbed everything, but it would make it more readable if I could specify the order which the tests results are displayed - thematically instead of alphabetically. So far the only thing I can think of is to prepend a_ b_ c_ to classes to classes, namespaces and methods. (Not nice) I think a [TestOrderAttribute] attribute would be nice - not stricly followed by the framework, but a hint so we can achieve this