You can't depend on the EJB3 container being initialized in a @BeforeClass/beforeTestClass method, because it does in fact run before the embedded container is started by SeamTest.init(). I believe TestNG will run tests in the order they're specified in the testng.xml file, so you could define an empty test (inheriting from SeamTest) that gets the container initialization done and have it run before any of your other tests. Speaking of things out of date, Seam is using a pretty old version of TestNG. Any plans to update it to 5.1? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3969295#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...