I'd say the current behavior is correct. Your test class qualifies as a JUnit 3 test class but not as a JUnit 4 one. Hence the @Ignore has no relevance. You could try to turn the class into a JUnit 4 test class, say by annotating it with @RunWith(JUnit4.class), or by annotating one method with @Test.

Unfortunately the suggested workaround of using @RunWith does not appear to work. My present alternative is to specify excludes on the Test task, which is what I was trying to avoid by applying @Ignore.

It should also be noted that this same configuration works for a maven project.

This should work if you remove the " extends TestCase" from your test.

It seems that extending from TestCase is causing it to be interpreted as a JUnit 3 test. Eclipse has the same issue with it's test runners.

If you need to use the methods from TestCase, I recommend using static imports to access them.

This is now 'fixed', in that the behaviour is now the same as it was in 0.9-rc-3. Whether or not this is a good behaviour is another question. It is provided by JUnit itself, not Gradle, so it's probably a reasonable option.

You should note that the @Ignore annotation only works on test classes. It does not (and did not) work on test methods. Again, this is what JUnit provides for JUnit 3 tests.