On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 11:34 AM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info>
wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 10:29:50AM -0400, David Mertz wrote:
> But given that in general unit tests tend to only exercise a handful of
> values (have a look at the tests in the Python stdlib) I think it is
> fair to say that in practice unit tests typically do not have anywhere
> near the coverage of live data used during alpha and beta testing.
>
I still think it's a mixture. I write tests to also address "this really
shouldn't happen" cases as well (often in a loop, or using a Nose class for
scaffolding).
There's some saying/joke about software testing along the lines of:
For an argument that should be in range 1-100:
try 50; try 1; try 100
try 101; try 0;
try -1,
try 3.14
try 1+1j;
try the string "fish",
try a null pointer;
etc.
Many of those oddball cases can easily be in a list of values to test in
unit tests, but may be impossible or unlikely to make it to the function
call in the normal/possible flow of the program.
> I'm curious. When you write a function or method, do you include input
> checks? Here's an example from the Python stdlib (docstring removed for
> brevity):
>
> # bisect.py
> def insort_right(a, x, lo=0, hi=None):
> if lo < 0:
> raise ValueError('lo must be non-negative')
> if hi is None:
> hi = len(a)
> while lo < hi:
> mid = (lo+hi)//2
> if x < a[mid]: hi = mid
> else: lo = mid+1
> a.insert(lo, x)
>
> Do you consider that check for lo < 0 to be disruptive? How would you
> put that in a unit test?
>
I definitely put in checks like that. However, I might well write a test
like:
assert lo >= 0, "lo must be non-negative"
That would allow disabling the check for production. However, I presume
the stdlib does this for a reason; it presumably wants to allow callers to
catch a specific exception. I haven't seen anything in the contract
discussion that allows raising a particular exception when a contract is
violated, only a general one for all contracts.
The case of 'if hi is None' is different. It's remediation of a missing
value where it's perfectly fine to impute an unspecified value. So that
would be a poor contract.
--
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food
from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the
uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting
advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is
to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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