For the past year and half I’ve been working on a parallel test runner for python tests, stestr. I started this project to fit a need in the OpenStack community and it since has been adopted as the test runner used in the OpenStack project. But, it is generally a useful tool and something I think would provide general value for people writing python tests. I thought it would be valuable to explain two things in this post, first the testing stack underlying stestr and the history behind the project. The second aspect is how it compares to other popular python test runners are out there, and the purpose it fills.