One important use case is if you have dead locked tests, thus not xml result file is created.

I consider this very important - not just in the case of deadlocked tests, but in general. For example, if your integration tests take 10 minutes, you'll currently have to wait that long until you know what went wrong, even if the very first test failed. Aborting the build with CTRL+C doesn't work either because the test report is only written at the end.

Same problem exists for CheckStyle and Codenarc tasks, and probably also for others.

Any progress on this one? This is the most voted issue, please hear what people have to say.

This is easily my most needed feature and the one that keeps me from moving completely to Gradle. This shouldn't be too hard either, so I am hoping to see it soon.

In the meantime, what is the "official" workaround?

I've spent a couple weeks seeing if I can convert to gradle. In gradle the build never completes the tests - it just hangs(the builds including all of the tests, work fine in maven). Without real time logging, I have no way of getting information about where it is hanging when the tests run in gradle. Please fix this, as it looks like it could be a showstopper that prevents us from moving to gradle.

Implemented. See the example here and here. After the release, the reference docs with examples will be available at our usual location of the dsl reference for the Test task

I can't make it work, and because I can not reopen this issue, I created another one: http://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-2058