It could be interesting to enable uncalled `skip` by setting a default reason of "Unconditional skip" when the argument is a function. Do note that decorating with an uncalled `skip` does actually work to skip the test currently, but the test is marked as success rather than skipped (see example pasted below). For this reason, I don't think we should turn it into an error in maintenance releases, as anyone using this accidentally will suddenly have many failing tests. $ cat test.py from unittest import TestCase, skip class Test(TestCase): def test_good(self): self.assertTrue(1.0) def test_bad(self): self.assertFalse(1.0) @skip def test_bad_skip(self): self.assertFalse(1.0) @skip('always skipped') def test_good_skip(self): self.assertFalse(1.0) $ ./python.exe -m unittest test.py -v test_bad (test.Test) ... FAIL test_bad_skip (test.Test) ... ok test_good (test.Test) ... ok test_good_skip (test.Test) ... skipped 'always skipped' ====================================================================== FAIL: test_bad (test.Test) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/.../test.py", line 10, in test_bad self.assertFalse(1.0) AssertionError: 1.0 is not false ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 4 tests in 0.002s FAILED (failures=1, skipped=1)