Find which test that fail with stack overflow exception

Question

When a test causes a StackOverflowException what is the best way to determine which test that failed?

I'm working on a fairly large project in Visual Studio. There are ~4300 tests. At least one of them is causing a StackOverflowException. No test show up as failing, all I get is a message in the Output pane saying:

The active test run was aborted. Reason: Process is terminating due to StackOverflowException.

I've been in this situation before and resolved it by selecting a bunch of tests, ran them, and repeated until I could finally determine which test that caused the exception.

Is there a better way? Maybe it's possible to find out which tests that were running when the exception occurred?

Could you use a try catch and check for the exception being a "StackOverflowException".. then log out the test name etc... — Wheels73, Dec 11 '18 at 10:39
@Wheels73: It's not possible to catch `StackOverflowException` — Mårten Wikström, Dec 11 '18 at 10:40
In the catch, you can check to see if the type is StackoverFlowException... i.e. "if (exception is StackOverflowException)" — Wheels73, Dec 11 '18 at 10:41
@Wheels73 Nope. Besides I cannot add a catch block on every test. — Mårten Wikström, Dec 11 '18 at 10:43
@Wheels73: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1599219/c-sharp-catch-a-stack-overflow-exception — David, Dec 11 '18 at 10:44
Yeah, I'd normally be trying to chop the tests down to the smallest set that exhibits the problem somehow. The other approach is to ignore the tests for now and ask "what's changed?" — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Dec 11 '18 at 10:57
@Damien_The_Unbeliever Yup, that's what I'm doing. If only there was smoother (and/or less boring) way... :-) — Mårten Wikström, Dec 11 '18 at 11:04
I have a similar problem, @MårtenWikström. The weird this is I can run the test, they fail. Then if I run the rest of them, "Run Not Run Tests", they pass. So, it fails, to a point, but when I pick up after whatever the point is, they all pass. Effectively, they all pass, but it takes two passes to make them all work and I still don' t know which one(s) are causing the problem. — Rod, Apr 29 '19 at 15:37

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 26 '19 at 12:23

I post this from my experience in a big project, if you encounter that StackOverflowException, just put a breakpoint before any kind of process and run in Debug Mode, use F10 and F11 when needed and watch carefully if at any point the process will stop moving forward. If you find that line the problems is solved. One particular case was when someone created method to delete every documents in a folder before any test starts, folder which from my machine was missing and caused StackOverflowException being thrown

Find which test that fail with stack overflow exception

1 Answers1