Book Image

Test-Driven Python Development

By : Siddharta Govindaraj
Book Image

Test-Driven Python Development

By: Siddharta Govindaraj

Overview of this book

This book starts with a look at the test-driven development process, and how it is different from the traditional way of writing code. All the concepts are presented in the context of a real application that is developed in a step-by-step manner over the course of the book. While exploring the common types of smelly code, we will go back into our example project and clean up the smells that we find. Additionally, we will use mocking to implement the parts of our example project that depend on other systems. Towards the end of the book, we'll take a look at the most common patterns and anti-patterns associated with test-driven development, including integration of test results into the development process.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Test-Driven Python Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Brittle tests


We've implemented the three requirements for the update method:

  • -Done- It should take a timestamp and price value and set it on the object

  • -Done- After multiple updates, the object gives us the latest price

  • -Done- The price cannot be negative

Now, let us suppose that a new requirement comes up that we had not known about before:

  • The Stock class needs a method to check if the stock has an increasing trend. An increasing trend is one where each of the latest three updates is an increase over the previous one.

So far, our Stock implementation just stores the latest price. In order to implement this functionality, we need to store some history of past price values. One way to do this is to change the price variable to a list. The problem is that when we change the internals of our implementation, it would break all of our tests, because all of them access the price variable directly and assert that it has specific values.

What we see here is an example of test brittleness.

A test is...