py.test
Ian Bicking writes of py.test, a Python testing framework.
It is, to be sure, a big improvement on the standard unittest module, which has far strong of a Java flavor to be comfortable in Python. It is similar to my comfychair in some ways, and probably superior at the moment (though there are some comfychair features I am quite fond of.)
I think the problem with unittest (and to a much lesser extent the current version of comfychair) can be seen by considering a definition of a class: a class is a set of objects with different data sharing common behavior.
That implies one should create a class when there is particular behavior, and when that behavior is common to more than one object.
It is a mismatch if one needs to create a class to hold behaviour that isn't coupled into any particular object. Classes with only a single method are a bad smell but are common in unittest suites. It's also somewhat conceptually unclear what the object created by such a test fixture is meant to represent.
[more later?]
posted Wed 15 Dec 2004 in /software/testing | link
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