Book Image

Crafting Test-Driven Software with Python

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Crafting Test-Driven Software with Python

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

Test-driven development (TDD) is a set of best practices that helps developers to build more scalable software and is used to increase the robustness of software by using automatic tests. This book shows you how to apply TDD practices effectively in Python projects. You’ll begin by learning about built-in unit tests and Mocks before covering rich frameworks like PyTest and web-based libraries such as WebTest and Robot Framework, discovering how Python allows you to embrace all modern testing practices with ease. Moving on, you’ll find out how to design tests and balance them with new feature development and learn how to create a complete test suite with PyTest. The book helps you adopt a hands-on approach to implementing TDD and associated methodologies that will have you up and running and make you more productive in no time. With the help of step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll explore automatic tests and TDD best practices and get to grips with the methodologies and tools available in Python for creating effective and robust applications. By the end of this Python book, you will be able to write reliable test suites in Python to ensure the long-term resilience of your application using the range of libraries offered by Python for testing and development.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Software Testing and Test-Driven Development
6
Section 2: PyTest for Python Testing
13
Section 3: Testing for the Web
16
About Packt

Property-based testing

Now that we know how to have working test suites for both our code and our documentation, the quality of those test suites fully depends on our capability to design and write good tests.

There is, by the way, one rule in software testing that can help us design good tests, and this is that errors usually hide in corner cases and limit values. If we have a function that performs division between two numbers, the bugs are probably going to be brought to the surface when zero, the maximum integer value, or negative numbers are passed to the function as arguments. Rarely will we see errors for most common values, such as 2, 3, 4, or 5. That's because developers usually tend to design their code with those common values in mind. The design that comes more naturally is usually the one that works for the most obvious cases, and corner cases rarely come to mind in the first instance.

Property-based testing comes in handy when easily generating tests that verify those...