I’m finding that our Django project’s tests fall into an uncomfortable middle-ground, halfway between end-to-end acceptance tests and proper unit tests. As such they don’t exhibit the best qualities of either. I’d like to fix this. We’re testing our Django Continue reading
In which I once again indulge my obscure command-line fetish. I often spend hours of my day cycling through: Edit code and its unit tests Save my changes Push a button or change window focus to explicitly re-run the code’s Continue reading
The following was originally published in the excellent Python Magazine. Thier contractual exclusivity period has now long expired, so here it comes again. Many thanks to my technical reviewer Michael Foord, and to the editors Brandon Craig Rhodes and Doug Continue reading
I pretty much abandoned the use of asserts in production code once I was introduced to test driven development. Amongst their failings, assert statements are only suited to testing very localised conditions, such as within a particular function – it’s Continue reading
Sometimes when programming I like to leave unit tests running repeatedly in one window while editing the code and tests in another. The bash command watch is useful for this, and can highlight the differences between one invocation and the Continue reading
I want a Python unittest.assertAlmostEquals that compares numbers to N significant figures, instead of N decimal places. [python] >>> test.assertAlmostEquals(1e-8, 5e-14) >>> [/python] Even though these two numbers differ by a factor of 5 million, when comparing them to seven Continue reading
I’ve been trying to create a simple acceptance test for a pyglet application. A thorough suite of acceptance tests, verifying the correctness of all the shapes drawn to the screen by OpenGL, sounds like far more work than I want Continue reading