Unit-testing with dependencies between tests

Question

How do you do unit testing when you have

• some general unit tests
• more sophisticated tests checking edge cases, depending on the general ones

Answer 1

I have implemented a plugin for Nose (Python) 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).

You can find it here: nosedep.

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.