In this chapter, you looked a little more in detail at the important but often overlooked topic of keeping tests maintainable. You looked at the importance of having a consistent test file layout scheme and the pros and cons of various alternatives. You looked at naming tests and grouping tests, before moving to the topic of making tests easier to understand. Some of the strategies that we discussed were using docstrings, creating custom test class hierarchies, and utilizing fixtures. Finally, you looked at making code more readable by using helper functions, custom asserts, equality functions, and writing custom matchers.
In the next chapter, you will look at incorporating tests in your documentation using the doctest
module.