Testing SQLAthanor¶
Contents
Testing Philosophy¶
Note
Unit tests for SQLAthanor are written using pytest [1] and a comprehensive set of test automation are provided by tox [2].
There are many schools of thought when it comes to test design. When building SQLAthanor, we decided to focus on practicality. That means:
- DRY is good, KISS is better. To avoid repetition, our test suite makes extensive use of fixtures, parametrization, and decorator-driven behavior. This minimizes the number of test functions that are nearly-identical. However, there are certain elements of code that are repeated in almost all test functions, as doing so will make future readability and maintenance of the test suite easier.
- Coverage matters…kind of. We have documented the primary intended behavior of every function in the SQLAthanor library, and the most-likely failure modes that can be expected. At the time of writing, we have about 85% code coverage. Yes, yes: We know that is less than 100%. But there are edge cases which are almost impossible to bring about, based on confluences of factors in the wide world. Our goal is to test the key functionality, and as bugs are uncovered to add to the test functions as necessary.
Test Organization¶
Each individual test module (e.g. test_validators.py
) corresponds to a
conceptual grouping of functionality. For example:
test_validators.py
tests validator functions found insqlathanor/_validators.py
Certain test modules are tightly coupled, as the behavior in one test module may
have implications on the execution of tests in another. These test modules use
a numbering convention to ensure that they are executed in their required order,
so that test_1_NAME.py
is always executed before
test_2_NAME.py
.
Configuring & Running Tests¶
Installing with the Test Suite¶
$ pip install sqlathanor[tests]
See also
When you create a local development environment, all dependencies for running and extending the test suite are installed.
Command-line Options¶
SQLAthanor does not use any custom command-line options in its test suite.
Tip
For a full list of the CLI options, including the defaults available, try:
sqlathanor $ cd tests/
sqlathanor/tests/ $ pytest --help
Configuration File¶
Because SQLAthanor has a very simple test suite, we have not
prepared a pytest.ini
configuration file.
Running Tests¶
tests/ $ pytest
tests/ $ pytest tests/test_module.py
tests/ $ pytest tests/test_module.py -k 'test_my_test_function'
Skipping Tests¶
Note
Because of the simplicity of SQLAthanor, the test suite does not currently support any test skipping.
Incremental Tests¶
Note
The SQLAthanor test suite does support incremental testing using, however at the moment none of the tests designed rely on this functionality.
A variety of test functions are designed to test related functionality. As a
result, they are designed to execute incrementally. In order to execute tests
incrementally, they need to be defined as methods within a class that you decorate
with the @pytest.mark.incremental
decorator as shown below:
@pytest.mark.incremental
class TestIncremental(object):
def test_function1(self):
pass
def test_modification(self):
assert 0
def test_modification2(self):
pass
This class will execute the TestIncremental.test_function1()
test, execute and
fail on the TestIncremental.test_modification()
test, and automatically fail
TestIncremental.test_modification2()
because of the .test_modification()
failure.
To pass state between incremental tests, add a state
argument to their method
definitions. For example:
@pytest.mark.incremental
class TestIncremental(object):
def test_function(self, state):
state.is_logged_in = True
assert state.is_logged_in = True
def test_modification1(self, state):
assert state.is_logged_in is True
state.is_logged_in = False
assert state.is_logged_in is False
def test_modification2(self, state):
assert state.is_logged_in is True
Given the example above, the third test (test_modification2
) will fail because
test_modification
updated the value of state.is_logged_in
.
Note
state
is instantiated at the level of the entire test session (one run of
the test suite). As a result, it can be affected by tests in other test modules.
[1] | https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/ |
[2] | https://tox.readthedocs.io |