is there a way to make (some) tests run serially? we have some tests that run against a live system and can't be run in parallel. At the moment we're doing two calls to

./pants test

with the non-parallel ones being called with

--test-debug

or whatever the flag is. But we're adding more live-systems that can be run in parallel with each other, and as things grow everything's getting slower by multiples. e.g. tests

a_1, a_2, a_3

must be run serially. and

b_1, b_2, b_3

must be run serially. But

a_1

and

b_1

could be run in parallel. If not supported OOTB, is there a path to implementing this with a plugin?

We solved this in our testing framework using a file lock with a customizable name. The name helps with the grouping and the file lock helps make it "serial". It definitely is not the ideal solution, but it works

yeah, this is an option, but would require rewriting large amounts of code 😬

For us, it's Python, so it was a simple pytest fixture.