In VS2017, is there a way to copy the names of all the failed unit tests to the clipboard at one time?

Question

It is not my decision personally to have lingering failing unit tests.

In the solution I work with at my company, there are a few failing unit tests that have lingered over time. Occasionally, while making changes, another unit test will start to fail, but it won't be clear which one it is. To figure it out, it's sometimes necessary to copy at least the names of the failing unit tests out into a text file and do a comparison.

In VS2017, in the Test Explorer, you can right-click a unit test and select Copy, and it will copy the name and some other meta-information to your clipboard. However, if you select multiple unit tests, that option disappears. Additionally there doesn't appear to be any "Copy All" option available.

So if you're needing to copy the names of all of the unit tests that are failing (other related meta-information is okay), is there a way to do this in Visual Studio 2017 other than manually copying the tests one at a time?

Answer 1

This is not a direct answer to your question, but rather a workaround (though I'd call it a best practice compared to what you seem to be doing):

You seem to have a number of unit tests that produce errors and for whatever reason you decided to not fix them in time. Fixing them would be the obvious solution, but lets assume there were reasons to not do so.

Now everybody that develops a feature after that decision is in trouble, because the unit test result just became unreliable . They might fail and you will never know if it's your error, or maybe that test was supposed to fail because of the former (bad) decision. Failed tests have transformed from a red/green quality signal to a broken traffic light signaling nothing.

You should mark those tests that fail on purpose so that you know which they are. If you are using MSTest (the Visual Studio default) you can do so by annotating them with the [Ignore] attribute. That way, they will not be run, will not count as failed, but will still appear in the list and remind you of the fact that they still need to be fixed.

That way, your tests are reliable again. Anything red is something you broke. Anything red is something you need to fix. Yellow are tests that were broken anyway and green.. well is green.

No need to compare lists of testnames against each other. Use the means available.