Does anyone have any news on the state of this improvement?

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

We intend to prioritize issues that are actionable and impactful while working more closely with the community. Many of our JIRA issues are inactionable or irrelevant. We would like to request your help to ensure we can appropriately prioritize JIRA issues you’ve contributed to.

Please confirm that you still advocate for your JIRA issue before December 10th, 2016 by:

• Checking that your issues contain requisite context, impact, behaviors, and examples as described in our published guidelines.
• Leave a comment on the JIRA issue or open a new GitHub issue confirming that the above is complete.

We look forward to collaborating with you more closely on GitHub. Thank you for your contribution to Gradle!

I still face this issue and hope it can be fixed.

I don't quite understand the setup you have in place here. Do you separate production code and test code into different VCS repositories? In order to run the tests you'll have to build the JAR containing the tests? If that's the case then you can easily fulfill the requirement by using composite builds.

I won't go ahead and create an issue for this on GitHub. Please open an issue on GitHub if you think this is crucial to your organization. When opening the issue please explicitly describe your setup and organization of code.