I like to say that I don't have very much time ahead in this project, since my internship is only six months long. On one hand, this short time is not an excuse to skip tests. But on the other hand, I can not spend most of my time writing them. A good alternative for me was then to do some behavior-driven development tests.
Behavior-Driven Development test method allow me to test really important features without making me test every single line of my code. This method helps me create a minimal code that answer a specific need.
To use this method with my Python code, I use behave. Behave is a framework similar to cucumber that allow me to merge my specifications and my tests. This is really powerful since I can now show my tests results to anyone in my project : everybody can understand what is working, and what is not.
Here is a little illustration.
First, I describe my feature just like behave wants me to. I do it myself since my project is specific for my internship, but it can be written by an analyst, a customer, or whoever in charge of those scenarios.
Then, I - the developer - can assign the scenario to the right tests using specific behave tags : @given, @when and @then. It can seem quite annoying to separate those 3 steps, but everything can be store in the context. Also it makes every step reusable for multiple tests !
Behave also provides a lot of different features that can create very particular tests like the concept of "work in progress" scenarios or the use of some step data if needed.
Finally when I run those tests, results are shown in a very understandable way :
Note that the path following the '#' indicate the location of the method associate with the step. It is really useful for refactoring the code and still be able to fix failed tests.
Behavior-Driven Development test method allow me to test really important features without making me test every single line of my code. This method helps me create a minimal code that answer a specific need.
To use this method with my Python code, I use behave. Behave is a framework similar to cucumber that allow me to merge my specifications and my tests. This is really powerful since I can now show my tests results to anyone in my project : everybody can understand what is working, and what is not.
Here is a little illustration.
Behave also provides a lot of different features that can create very particular tests like the concept of "work in progress" scenarios or the use of some step data if needed.
Finally when I run those tests, results are shown in a very understandable way :
Note that the path following the '#' indicate the location of the method associate with the step. It is really useful for refactoring the code and still be able to fix failed tests.
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