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

Writing PyTest fixtures

The primary difference between unittest and PyTest lies in how they handle fixtures. While unittest like fixtures (setUp, tearDown, setupClass, and so on) are still supported through the TestCase class when using pytest, pytest tries to provide further decoupling of tests from fixtures.

In pytest, a fixture can be declared using the pytest.fixture decorator. Any function decorated with the decorator becomes a fixture:

@pytest.fixture
def greetings():
print("HELLO!")
yield
print("GOODBYE")

The code of the test is executed where we see the yield statement. yield in this context passes execution to the test itself. So this fixture would print "HELLO" before the test starts and then "GOODBYE" when the test finishes.

To then bind a fixture to a test, the pytest.mark.usefixtures decorator is used. So, for example, to use our new fixture with the existing TestMultiple.test_second test, we would have to decorate that test...