Unittest tests order

Question

How do I be sure of the unittest methods order? Is the alphabetical or numeric prefixes the proper way?

class TestFoo(TestCase):
    def test_1(self):
               


        

Answer 1

I have implemented a plugin nosedep for Nose which adds support for test dependencies and test prioritization.

As mentioned in the other answers/comments this is often a bad idea, however there can be exceptions where you would want to do this (in my case it was performance for integration tests - with a huge overhead for getting into a testable state, minutes vs hours).

A minimal example is:

def test_a:
  pass

@depends(before=test_a)
def test_b:
  pass

To ensure that test_b is always run before test_a.