Book Image

Python Unlocked

By : Arun Tigeraniya
Book Image

Python Unlocked

By: Arun Tigeraniya

Overview of this book

Python is a versatile programming language that can be used for a wide range of technical tasks—computation, statistics, data analysis, game development, and more. Though Python is easy to learn, it’s range of features means there are many aspects of it that even experienced Python developers don’t know about. Even if you’re confident with the basics, its logic and syntax, by digging deeper you can work much more effectively with Python – and get more from the language. Python Unlocked walks you through the most effective techniques and best practices for high performance Python programming - showing you how to make the most of the Python language. You’ll get to know objects and functions inside and out, and will learn how to use them to your advantage in your programming projects. You will also find out how to work with a range of design patterns including abstract factory, singleton, strategy pattern, all of which will help make programming with Python much more efficient. Finally, as the process of writing a program is never complete without testing it, you will learn to test threaded applications and run parallel tests. If you want the edge when it comes to Python, use this book to unlock the secrets of smarter Python programming.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Python Unlocked
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mock for tests


Key 1: Mock what you do not have.

When we are using test driven development, we have to write test cases for the components that rely on other components that are not written yet or take a lot of time to execute. This is close to impossible until we create mocks and stubs. In this scenario, stubs or mocks are very useful. We use a fake object instead of a real one to write the test case. This can be made very easy if we use tools that are provided by the language. For example, in the following code, we only have the interface for the worker class, and no real implementation of it. We want to test the assign_if_free function.

Instead of writing any stub ourselves, we use the create_autospec function to create a mock object from the definition of the Worker abstract class. We also set up a return value for the function call of checking whether worker was busy or not:

import six
import unittest
import sys
import abc
if sys.version_info[0:2] >= (3, 3):
    from unittest.mock...