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

Goals of test maintenance


As we have seen throughout this book, unit tests serve a number of different purposes:

  • Serve as a test suite: This is the most obvious goal of unit tests. A comprehensive test suite reduces the number of bugs that can escape into production.

  • Serve as documentation: When we are trying to understand what a class or method is trying to do, it is useful to take a look at the test suite. A well-written test suite will illustrate how the piece of code is supposed to behave.

  • Serve as a safety net: This frees us from pressure when we refactor or clean up the code.

  • Illustrate the design: Using mocks, we can depict the interactions between different classes or modules.

The goal of a well-written suite of unit tests is to enable these purposes as well as possible.

For example, if we want to understand what a method does, then we need to work out the following:

  • Can we locate its unit test suite easily?

  • Once located, is it easy to understand the tests and what they are testing for...