[denzil]

My usual strategy is to ensure that the lengthy parts are executed only once. So for example one of the lengthy parts is environment setup for me too. So what I did is to put as much as possible on the docker image I build and then I start tests from image mostly ready to run. Of course something similar can be done during runtime. If starting the software you test takes long time, you could set it up only once and run multiple tests without tearing down the setup. Of course this has disadvantage of having possibly tainted environment and there is risk of making the tests depend on previous state. On the other hand this could also help discover problems that are hidden by always running tests on clean slate, so it's a tradeoff. And I have to note that I mostly do integration testing, so the long parts are probably in different places than for unit testing.