I don't think this is a big problem; trying to focus on multiple examples at once is difficult.
It might be a problem if tests are slow and you are forced to work on all of them at once.
But in that case I'd try to make the tests faster (getting rid of network requests, disk/DB access by faking them away or hoisting to the caller).
I usually even comment out all the failing tests but the first one, after translating a bunch of specifications into tests, so I see the "green" when an example starts working.
Maybe it would be easier to grok multiple regex examples than algorithmic ones, but at least for myself, I am skeptical, and I prefer taking them one at a time.
Of course, ymmv depending on how good your initial intuition is, and how tricky the problem is.
With pytest you can use the -x flag to stop after the first test failure.
Even better you can use that in combination with -lf to only run the last failed test.
> Even better you can use that in combination with -lf to only run the last failed test.
Fwiw `--sw` is much better for that specific use-case.
`--lf` is more useful to run the entire test suite, then re-run just the failed tests (of the entire suite). IIRC it can have some odd interactions with `-x` or `--maxfail`, because the strange things happen to the cached "selected set".
Though it may also be because I use xdist a fair bit, and the interaction of xdist with early interruptions (x, maxfail, ...) seems less than perfect.
Another option is to use a custom mark on the test you want to run, and then do something like "pytest -v -m onlyrunthis"