Execute unit tests serially (rather than in parallel)

Question

I am attempting to unit test a WCF host management engine that I have written. The engine basically creates ServiceHost instances on the fly based on configuration. This allows us to dynamically reconfigure which services are available without having to bring all of them down and restart them whenever a new service is added or an old one is removed.

I have run into a difficulty in unit testing this host management engine, however, due to the way ServiceHost works. If a ServiceHost has already been created, opened, and not yet closed for a particular endpoint, another ServiceHost for the same endpoint can not be created, resulting in an exception. Because of the fact that modern unit testing platforms parallelize their test execution, I have no effective way to unit test this piece of code.

I have used xUnit.NET, hoping that because of its extensibility, I could find a way to force it to run the tests serially. However, I have not had any luck. I am hoping that someone here on SO has encountered a similar issue and knows how to get unit tests to run serially.

NOTE: ServiceHost is a WCF class, written by Microsoft. I don't have the ability to change it's behavior. Hosting each service endpoint only once is also the proper behavior...however, it is not particularly conducive to unit testing.

Answer 1

Each test class is a unique test collection and tests under it will run in sequence, so if you put all of your tests in same collection then it will run sequentially.

In xUnit you can make following changes to achieve this:

Following will run in parallel:

namespace IntegrationTests
{
    public class Class1
    {
        [Fact]
        public void Test1()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test1 called");
        }

        [Fact]
        public void Test2()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test2 called");
        }
    }

    public class Class2
    {
        [Fact]
        public void Test3()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test3 called");
        }

        [Fact]
        public void Test4()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test4 called");
        }
    }
}

To make it sequential you just need to put both the test classes under same collection:

namespace IntegrationTests
{
    [Collection("Sequential")]
    public class Class1
    {
        [Fact]
        public void Test1()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test1 called");
        }

        [Fact]
        public void Test2()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test2 called");
        }
    }

    [Collection("Sequential")]
    public class Class2
    {
        [Fact]
        public void Test3()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test3 called");
        }

        [Fact]
        public void Test4()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Test4 called");
        }
    }
}

For more info you can refer to this link