Alessandro Molina - Crafting Test-Driven Software with Python

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Alessandro Molina has been a Python developer since 2001, and has always been interested in Python as a web development platform. He has worked as a CTO and a team leader of Python teams for the past 10 years and is currently the core developer of the TurboGears2 web framework and the maintainer of the Beaker caching/session framework. He authored the DEPOT file storage framework and the DukPy JavaScript interpreter for Python and has collaborated on various Python projects related to web development, such as FormEncode, ToscaWidgets, and the Ming MongoDB ORM.

Michael Burrows has worked for 20 years across a number of programming languages, market verticals, and software delivery roles. His main focus for the last 10 years or so has been using Python to make teams more efficient and effective.

This book cover s testing and test-driven development practices, introducing you to the most widespread tools and concepts that are common in the software testing community, using both the Python native unittest module and the pytest framework.

This book is aimed at any Python developers that want to learn how they can test their applications and integrate testing into their development model, as well as for developers who know how to test software in other languages but are just turning to Python and thus don't yet know which tools are available to them.

, Getting Started with Software Testing , provides an i ntroduction to the core concepts of automated testing and to the unittest P ython module.

, Test Doubles with a Chat Application , p resents the most common kinds of test doubles while building a real-time chat application.

, Test-Driven Development while Creating a TODO List , covers w riting a todo list application adhering to the test-driven development best practices.

, Scaling the Test Suite , e xplores the complexities of maintaining a test suite as the software and the suite grow in size and complexity.

, Introduction to PyTest , presents the pytest framework and explores how it differs from the unittest module.

, Dynamic and Parametric Tests and Fixtures , d ives into more advanced features of pytest , such as parametric tests and dynamic fixtures.

, Fitness Function with a Contact Book Application , d ives into more advanced concepts related to acceptance tests and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) building a real application.

, PyTest Essential Plugins , s howcases the most widespread pytest plugins that can be helpful in most projects.

, Managing Test Environments with Tox , p resents how to manage test suites across different Python environments.

, Test Documentation and Property-Based Testing, introduces the concept of testing documentation and auto-generating tests based on the properties of the system under test .

, Testing for the Web: WSGI versus HTTP, covers h ow to test client-server applications based on the HTTP and WSGI protocols.

, End-to-End Testing with the Robot Framework, covers h ow to write tests that drive a real browser acting on a web application .

You will need a recent version of Python 3 and pip (the package installer for Python).

All code examples in this book have been tested using Python 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 on Linux. However, they should work on other systems too. PyTest 6.0.2 was used by the examples that rely on PyTest.

Additional packages and libraries will be installed from the Python Package Index ( PyPI ) using pip over the course of the chapters.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code .

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Crafting-Test-Driven-Software-with-Python . In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/ . Check them out!

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.