Daily Shaarli
September 21, 2024
The unittest unit testing framework was originally inspired by JUnit and has a similar flavor as major unit testing frameworks in other languages. It supports test automation, sharing of setup and shutdown code for tests, aggregation of tests into collections, and independence of the tests from the reporting framework.
To achieve this, unittest supports some important concepts in an object-oriented way:
- test fixture
A test fixture represents the preparation needed to perform one or more tests, and any associated cleanup actions. This may involve, for example, creating temporary or proxy databases, directories, or starting a server process. - test case
A test case is the individual unit of testing. It checks for a specific response to a particular set of inputs. unittest provides a base class, TestCase, which may be used to create new test cases. - test suite
A test suite is a collection of test cases, test suites, or both. It is used to aggregate tests that should be executed together. - test runner
A test runner is a component which orchestrates the execution of tests and provides the outcome to the user. The runner may use a graphical interface, a textual interface, or return a special value to indicate the results of executing the tests.
Reference:
- python3 doc: unittest.mock — getting started
- python3 doc: unittest.mock — mock object library
- python3 doc: unittest — Unit testing framework - assert methods
- python3 doc: unittest — Unit testing framework - class unittest.TestCase(methodName='runTest')
At its core, Buildbot is a job scheduling system: it queues jobs, executes the jobs when the required resources are available, and reports the results.
Your Buildbot installation has one or more masters and a collection of workers. The masters monitor source-code repositories for changes, coordinate the activities of the workers, and report results to users and developers. Workers run on a variety of operating systems.
You configure Buildbot by providing a Python configuration script to the master. This script can be very simple, configuring built-in components, but the full expressive power of Python is available. This allows dynamic generation of configuration, customized components, and anything else you can devise.
The framework itself is implemented in Twisted Python, and compatible with all major operating systems.
Testing applications has become a standard skill set required for any competent developer today. The Python community embraces testing, and even the Python standard library has good inbuilt tools to support testing. In the larger Python ecosystem, there are a lot of testing tools. Pytest stands out among them due to its ease of use and its ability to handle increasingly complex testing needs.
