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

Chapter 5. Working with Legacy Code

Having a solid set of unit tests is critical for a successful project. As you have seen so far, not only do unit tests help prevent bugs from getting into the code, but they also help in many other ways such as guiding the design, enabling us to refactor the code and keep it more maintainable, as well as a reference where you can see what the expected behavior is supposed to be.

TDD is the best way to ensure that our code has all the properties mentioned in the preceding paragraph. But, as anyone who has worked on larger, more complex projects knows, there are always pieces of code that don't have tests. Usually, this is the code written many years ago, long before we started practicing TDD. Or, it might have been the code that was written in a hurry to meet an urgent deadline.

Either way, this is the code that does not have associated tests. The code is often messy. It has a ton of dependencies on other classes. And now, we need to add a new feature to...