Writing repeat code is likely one of the things you least enjoy. At least it’s the case for me.
In a world striving for time, cost and resource efficiency less is more.
How can we apply this same philosophy to Unit Testing?
We often need to reuse resources (like input data, database connections, shared objects and so on) across our Unit Tests.
As a Python developer, you’re likely familiar with Pytest, the popular Unit Testing framework.
It’s a powerful tool to test your Python programs using easy and concise syntax, with a plethora of built-in functionality and Pytest plugins to enhance your testing experience.
Most developers use the CLI to run tests. But it’s actually possible (and easier) to run tests with just a single mouse click. You might be wondering, “Really? But how?”.
If you’re using VS Code then you can set it up in just a few minutes. Saving you countless hours in iterative development and testing time.
If you’re a developer using TDD (test-driven development), you’re familiar with the importance of Unit Tests.
Perhaps you want to test several sets of input data and edge cases. Imagine writing a unit test for each of the infinite inputs.
Fortunately, there’s a better way.
As a Python developer, you may face challenges when executing tests, especially with complex directory structures.
Perhaps you faced a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportErrorwhen running your tests and wondering why Pytest cannot import the modules.
Software testing is critical to your development process, ensuring your code works as expected.
As Python continues to gain popularity as a backend and scripting language, choosing the right testing framework becomes increasingly important.
Two prominent options in the Python ecosystem are Unittest and Pytest. Both frameworks provide powerful capabilities for writing and executing tests but differ in approach, features, and community support.
In this article, we delve into the comparison between Unittest vs Pytest, shedding light on their strengths, weaknesses, and distinctive features.
While developing any software solution, keeping track of events is crucial. Logging serves as a means of tracking events to catch software bugs, as they happen.
Although Pytest is great at running tests, it doesn’t automatically display the output of print statements or logs, which can be a problem when trying to debug failing tests.
As software engineers, handling errors is an important part of code development.
How often do users behave unexpectedly? More often than not. In most respect, people, systems and the Universe are random.
Maybe your code expects user input or takes data from a received packet and transforms it, perhaps performing complex calculations.
Network delays, even reordering or corrupted data. Whatever be it, it’s good to plan for the worst.
Javascript Object Notation (JSON) is arguably one of the most popular data exchange formats over the web.
Web services use serialisation to convert data from low-level data structures to JSON format that allows receiving services to easily deserialise it.
When writing Unit tests the need for testing JSON input and outputs is one of high importance.
Test data, API Responses and sometimes even config files are defined in JSON which makes it necessary to understand how to read and write to it, using Pytest.
When writing unit tests, it’s hard to consider all possible edge cases and validate that your code works correctly.
This is sometimes caught in production and a quick and speedy patch needs to be deployed. Only for a new bug to emerge later.
There will always be cases you didn’t consider, making this an ongoing maintenance job. Unit testing solves only some of these issues.
There are several frameworks for building robust and scalable Rest APIs with Python.
FastAPI, Flask and Django are the most popular, reliable and easy to use.
However, building APIs is incomplete without thorough testing.
Unit tests and Integration tests are necessary to ensure your API works for client use cases.
Most of these frameworks come with inbuilt Unittest integration, but writing and maintaining test classes can be cumbersome.