JIRA: https://jira.spring.io/browse/INT-3543 Quoting Sam Brannen: > However, one should *never* programmatically close the injected application context in a test, since the Spring TestContext Framework caches all contexts across the entire JVM process. If you need to close a context after a test method or test class for some reason, the only supported and reliable mechanism is `@DirtiesContext`. **Cherry-pick to 4.0.x**