Anything similar to the below line will cause testing to fail at runtime (assuming JUnit or TestNG was selected and there are unit tests to actually run – so the task doesn't get skipped)

test { environment = ['FOO':'foo'] }

Since this completely removes any default environment variables, it produces the below error message with no indication as to why something went wrong.

org.gradle.util.UncheckedException: java.lang.Error: Failed to create temporary
file for jnidispatch library: java.io.IOException: Access is denied
at org.gradle.util.UncheckedException.asUncheckedException(UncheckedExce
ption.java:31)

In this case, it's because %TEMP% is missing and jansi depends upon JNA, which fails to function properly.

Specifying %TEMP% gets things farther, but it still fails without an indication that it is because fundamental environment variables are missing.

Ideally gradle would check to ensure that any necessary environment variables are set before continuing, and print out error messages indicating what actually is missing.