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

Managing temporary data with tmp_path

Many applications need to write data to disk. Surely we don't want data written during tests to interfere with the data we read/write during the real program execution. Data fixtures used in tests usually have to be predictable and we certainly don't want to corrupt real data when we run our tests.

So it's common for a test suite to have its own read/write path where all the data is written. If we decided the path beforehand, by the way, there would be the risk that different test runs would read previous data and thus might not spot bugs or might fail without a reason.

For this reason, one of the fixtures that pytest provides out of the box is tmp_path, which, when injected into a test, provides a temporary path that is always different on every test run. Also, it will take care of retaining the most recent temporary directories (for debugging purposes) while deleting the oldest ones:

def test_tmp(tmp_path):
f = tmp_path / &quot...