If you take a quick glance at the Test Explorer window in Visual Studio 2015, you might not notice all of the power that you have in that little window. To start, there is a grouping icon, that allows you to group your tests by various properties. The grouping is a great way to get common tests together so you can easily select them and run them in test explorer.

TestExplorerGroupBy

You have the option to group by:

Group By Description
Class This will group by the class name to which the test belongs. Note: This is not the fully qualified class name, so if you have multiple classes in different namespaces with the same name, they will be hard to differentiate.
Duration This will group by the duration of the last test run. It uses 3 categories when grouping (Fast < 100ms, Medium > 100ms, and Slow > 1 sec).
Outcome This will group by the outcome of the last run of the tests. It uses 3 categories when grouping (Passed Tests, Failed Tests, and Skipped Tests).
Traits This will group tests based on the TestCategory, Owner, Priority, and TestProperty attributes assigned to tests. Note: Tests can have multiple trait attributes assigned to them and thus a single test could appear multiple times in this view.
Project This will group tests by the project to which they belong.

While the grouping is nice, the real power in this dialog is the search feature. From the documentation, you can search on the following:

Qualifier Description
Trait Searches both trait category and value for matches. The syntax to specify trait categories and values are defined by the unit test framework.
Project Searches the test project names for matches.
Error Message Searches the user-defined error messages returned by failed asserts for matches.
File Path Searches the fully qualified file name of test source files for matches.
Fully Qualified Name Searches the fully qualified file name of test namespaces, classes, and methods for matches.
Output Searches the user-defined error messages that are written to standard output (stdout) or standard error (stderr). The syntax to specify output messages are defined by the unit test framework.
Outcome Searches the Test Explorer category names for matches: Failed Tests, Skipped Tests, Passed Tests.

Let's take an example. Say I have the following tests in my system (implementations removed for brevity):

[TestMethod]
public async Task TestMethodNone()

[TestMethod, TestCategory("Unit")]
public async Task TestMethodUnit()

[TestMethod, TestCategory("DAL"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public async Task TestMethodDALUnit()

[TestMethod, TestCategory("DAL"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public async Task TestMethodDALUnit2()

[TestMethod, TestCategory("DAL"), TestCategory("Integration")]
public async Task TestMethodADALIntegration()

If I group by trait and don't filter anything, then I'll see the following tests:

TestExplorerGroupedByTrait

Next, I could filter the tests by specifying I only want tests with the Unit trait. The search term would be Trait:"Unit":

TestExplorerUnitTestsOnly

I can also filter to only show tests that are both DAL and Unit tests by using the search term Trait:"Unit" Trait:"DAL":

TestExplorerUnitAndDAL

If I want to exclude tests with a given attribute, I could exclude all DAL tests by using the minus symbol, so my search term would be Trait:"Unit" -Trait:"DAL":

TestExplorerUnitNotDAL

You can also pair this with other searchable attributes on the tests. So, after a test run, if I want to find all unit tests that failed, I could use the search term Trait:"Unit" Outcome:"Failed":

TestExplorerFailedUnitTests

As you can see, the grouping and filtering available to you in the Test Explorer window is pretty robust; it just takes a little time to dig into it and learn the syntax. The Run unit tests with Test Explorer article on MSDN gives a lot of good information on this topic and is a worthwhile read if you are using this window in your day to day work. Thanks to William Custode for asking a question on StackOverflow that gave me inspiration for this blog post.