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Asked: 2026-05-23T00:40:47+00:00

More than once the question has been asked on SO. But the only answers

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More than once the question has been asked on SO. But the only answers that are given read “you should not need to order your unit tests, it is bad because” or “you can avoid that if…”

I already know it is bad, why it is bad, and techniques to avoid it. But that is not what I want to know. I’d like to know if it is possible to order the execution of NUnit tests, other than an alphabetical order. To be blunt: I actually want state to propogate from one test to the next. Trust me that I have a clever reason for this, that defies the usual philosophy.

MSTest has the “ordered test” capability, which is very useful in certain cases. I’d like to have that ability in NUnit. Can it be done?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The work-around (hack) is to alphabetize your test case names. See this thread:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/nunit-3.0/+bug/740539

    Relying on alphabetical order is a workaround that you can use but it is not documented and supported beyond the visual order of the display. In theory it could change at any time. In practice it won’t change until NUnit 3.0, so you’re pretty safe using it as a workaround

    This quote is from Charlie Poole, the main dev on NUnit.

    It also seems they have a scheme cooking to support ordered tests in NUnit 3, though how they will do so is still under discussion.

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