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

Embracing specifications by example

A common problem with acceptance tests is that it takes some effort to understand what's going on. If you are not already familiar with the domain, it can be easy to misunderstand them, thus leading to the wrong checks being performed even if everyone that reviewed it agreed with the original acceptance tests.

For example, if I read an acceptance test such as the following:

Given a first number 2
And a second number 3
When I run the software
Then I get 3 as the output

I might be tempted to understand it as, Oh, ok! The test is meant to verify that given two numbers, we print the highest one.

But that might not be the requirement; the requirement might actually be, Given two numbers, print the lowest one plus one. How can I understand which one that test was actually meant to verify?

The answer is to provide more examples. The more examples we provide for our tests, the easier it is to understand them.

Examples are provided in a table-like format,...