Hey guys. I am facing the same issue. Before databricks connect the unit tests with pytest were working properly.

I´ve tried even to create a newSession()  and use pytest-spark library but both approach did not work.

I got the following error " 

E RuntimeError: Only remote Spark sessions using Databricks Connect are supported. Use DatabricksSession.builder to create a remote Spark session instead.
E Refer to https://docs.databricks.com/dev-tools/databricks-connect.html on how to configure Databricks Connect.

.venv\Lib\site-packages\pyspark\sql\session.py:552: RuntimeError
===================================================================== short test summary info ======================================================================
ERROR tests/unit/test_functions.py::test_if_function_add_year_month - RuntimeError: Only remote Spark sessions using Databricks Connect are supported. Use DatabricksSession.builder to create a remote Spark session instead.
========================================================================= 1 error in 0.17s ========================================================================= "

Let´s wait a solution. In case I have any news I update the topic here. Cheers.