Shawn Neal has a great post (ok it might be a rant) on organizing test code. I agree with his article, on the separation of different kinds of tests into separate assemblies that perhaps can be run at different times (not always with the build). Only the true unit tests should probably be running with each build, and for each developer. If there are other tests that run very fast (by my definition, a fast test either passes or fails in under 1/10 second [100ms]) they too could be included in per-build and per-developer runs, provided that they don't bog down the total test time too much, and provided that they are in separate assemblies.

Someday, when technology allows for it, we should even be able to run our tests in parallel threads or parallel processes (see the 2.5 target features for NUnit). Speed is truly important. If your development team has 10 developers, every minute they wait for a build to complete or a test run to complete is 10 minutes a day of development time wasted. If they build and test 6 times a day each (that's not very much BTW) that is one team development hour per day. Realistically it's likely to be more like 5 or 6 development hours a day.

So if someone is paying attention to how time is spent, we could say perhaps that spending a couple of development hours on the tests to make them run faster, and save one minute per execution would more than pay for itself in a single day.

The moral of this story is keep the tests fast, and when they aren't, fix them or move them out of the main test path.