Newer versions of junit support concurrent running of tests. The org.springframework.test package is really not designed for concurrency. The enclosed fixes sharpen focus on concurrency (including making mutable state much more distinct from immutable state), increasing separation between data for each test-method run and the class they are being run on. The patch contains minor changes to the ContextLoaderListener interface. The patch consists of failing test (patch 1) and fix (patch 2), including several new tests. If you choose to apply the patch with the failing test, you must revert this before applying the fix (failing test is contained in fix patch). The included failing test may not produce concurrency issues (fail) in all cases and on all hardware platforms. They have been known to fail consistently on 3 different machines, usually upon first run. Details of the patch: Classes TestContextManager and TestContext are the biggest changes. Additionally upon completing the functionality, I had multiple deadlocks in the JVM when running my real test-base. I solved this by using a JDK1.5 ReaderWriterLock in the "RequestAttributes" getSessionMutex() method. It really looks to me like the creation of this mutex should be moved to one of the loader filters; since it's always created as of this patch. Additionally, the patch contains a "MockContextLoader" class; this class transfers attributes between threads. I'd really like you guys to check that code out before accepting it; there may be other smarter ways of doing this. It's only a part of the test code-base, but once it's included it sets a standard. Real-life tests The patch has been applied to a local version of spring3 that has been running stably with multi-core machines and multi-cpu servers too. We have been running a continious build using both parallel classes, methods and both. This is a full-scale build that was adaptible to multi-threaded test running. The application under tests uses lots of web-scopes etc. For the documentation: Parallel running of tests From version 3.0, spring supports parallel running of tests through the junit4 fixture, SpringJUnit4ClassRunner. Running builds in parallel with junit is only supported in later versions of junit, and it is recommended to use at least junit 4.6 for this feature. Please also note that there's no guarantee your tests will run properly in parallel, a number of general concurrency issues have to be obeserved when running tests in parallel. Your runner can usually let you choose between classes, methods and both. Classes is usually the easiest to get working, "both" the hardest. All three modes are supported.