Hello,
In my latest project I'm finally implementing unit tests from square one,
trying to get as close to 100% test coverage as possible. Being new to unit
testing I've noticed that almost all online information, including anything
in the Pylons documentation and book, deals with the easy part: how writing
unit tests works technically and what tools can help you write them.
However, the more interesting (and difficult) question is not "how" to test,
but "what" to test for.

What to test for is something you learn from experience (i.e. testing for
similar bugs to what you've encountered in the past or if a supposedly fixed
bug might pop up again). Does anyone have any useful experiences or thoughts
about the rationale behind their unit tests? It would be interesting to
compile some best practices and general patterns for writing unit tests for
Pylons-based applications (even if it are just some general tips or ideas,
though specific issues you've experienced are very interesting as well).

Back to my own project: I'm still working on writing the models and, of
course, their unit tests. If you have any ideas about pitfalls to avoid or
better ways to test here are the tests as I've written them so far:

http://bitbucket.org/fmw/edgar/src/tip/edgar/tests/

My own experiences so far:
- the concept of writing tests before you write the actual code from
test-driven development is worth sticking to, as it is harder to guarantee
the integrity of the tests if you do it the other way around, and,
- it is not enough to recreate your tables before running each test, meaning
you need to actually clean up model.Session at the same time (i.e. purge
open transactions that might still contain remnants from previous tests).

My apologies if this is outside of the scope of the list.

-Filip

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