Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Overview of this book

Bugs are a time consuming burden during software development. Django's built-in test framework and debugging support help lessen this burden. This book will teach you quick and efficient techniques for using Django and Python tools to eradicate bugs and ensure your Django application works correctly. This book will walk you step by step through development of a complete sample Django application. You will learn how best to test and debug models, views, URL configuration, templates, and template tags. This book will help you integrate with and make use of the rich external environment of test and debugging tools for Python and Django applications. The book starts with a basic overview of testing. It will highlight areas to look out for while testing. You will learn about different kinds of tests available, and the pros and cons of each, and also details of test extensions provided by Django that simplify the task of testing Django applications. You will see an illustration of how external tools that provide even more sophisticated testing features can be integrated into Django's framework. On the debugging front, the book illustrates how to interpret the extensive debugging information provided by Django's debug error pages, and how to utilize logging and other external tools to learn what code is doing.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Revisiting the doctest caveats


In the previous chapter, we developed a list of things to watch out for when writing doctests. When discussing these, unit tests were sometimes mentioned as an alternative that did not suffer from the same problems. But are unit tests really immune to these problems, or do they just make the problems easier to avoid or address? In this section, we revisit the doctest caveats and consider how susceptible unit tests are to the same or similar issues.

Environmental dependence

The first doctest caveat discussed was environmental dependence: relying on the implementation details of code other than the code actually being tested. Though this type of dependence can happen with unit tests, it is less likely to occur. This is because a very common way for this type of dependence to creep into doctests is due to reliance on the printed representation of objects, as they are displayed in a Python shell session. Unit tests are far removed from the Python shell. It requires...