I think I have a good use-case for ordered tests. I am writing a class that uses SWFAddress. SWFAddress uses all static methods and its SWFAddress.as class is reliant on communication with its js counterpart in the browser. The first time you register an event listener for its CHANGE event, it fires off its INIT event. I need to test interaction with the class and therefore SWFAddress before the INIT event is fired and after it.

There is absolutely no way to tearDown SWFAddress, and without any way to control the order of the tests, I can’t ensure that one group of tests occur before INIT and one group of tests occur after INIT. In this case, I think the only solution would be control of order.

“Variables representing objects, arrays, and functions are compared by reference. Two such variables are equal if they refer to the same object, array, or function. Two separate arrays are never considered equal, even if they have the same number of elements.”

What that boils down to is that there is no way to do equality tests on Objects or Arrays without writing your own custom equality functions. I’ve tried writing a simple test that compares the data sent from a form to the data that comes back after some server side processing and this limitation has made it pretty much pointless. I would need unit tests for my unit tests and that just doesn’t make sense.

If one test depends on another you have a fragile test suite. Refactor and introduce a setup that puts the system in a state suitable for both tests (or break them apart and have separate setups). If tests absolutely must depend on each other then they should be explicitly written in sequence, relying on the framework running things in alphabetical order seems like inviting trouble. It also makes it less obvious what the tests do and what they actually test. One reason for writing tests (although not the main one) is that they describe how the system works. Depending on tests running in a particular order (which isn’t necessarily obvious) makes the tests less understandable.

You express rightly, and very well, that unit tests should have no external dependencies and should manage their own state, however unit tests are not the only type of tests written with this, and other, frameworks. Very nice article, thanks from the community at large for your efforts.

That’s what I know from Nunit. For me it’s more natural behaviour. I definitely will check dpUnit.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you ask, but this is what would happen with your example test case:

1. an instance of TestClass is created
2. setUp runs
3. test1 runs
4. tearDown runs
5. another instance of TestClass is created
6. setUp runs
7. test2 runs
8. tearDown runs
9. a third instance of TestClass is created
10. setUp runs
11. test3 runs 12 tearDown runs

Each test is run in its own instance of the test case class.

If this bothers you very much switch to dpUnit which does this instead:

1. an instance of TestClass is created
2. setUp runs
3. test1 runs
4. tearDown runs
5. setUp runs
6. test2 runs
7. tearDown runs
8. setUp runs
9. test3 runs
10. tearDown runs

…which makes more sense. dpUnit also supports asynchronous setUp and some other things that FlexUnit don’t have. I’ve switched myself and I’m not looking back.