Nevow/nevow/js/Divmod/UnitTest.js - run probably isn't the best place for this call to initRuntime, from my current understanding of xUnit. setUp would probably be slightly better, but alas most (all?) subclasses which override setUp do not bother to call the base implementation. Perhaps the best place would be in a generalized extensible fixture API (eg, allow classes to have a fixtures attribute which includes objects with setUp and tearDown methods, all of which are invoked at the appropriate time).