In response to your 2nd and 4th points: - We have had a fine experience not using Play's ORM support at all -- we have a Plugin that handles transactions for u

In response to your 2nd and 4th points: - We have had a fine experience not using Play's ORM support at all -- we have a Plugin that handles transactions for us, and we use non-Play-integrated persistence. It still works great. - All of the Controller member variables are ThreadLocals, which is how Play handles concurrency. It seems like multi-threaded tests should work just as multi-threaded requests do. I'm curious what problem you're having with parallelizing tests?