Kent Johnson wrote: > Alex Hunsley wrote: >>Where do you seasoned pythonites see unittest and doctest in relation to >>each other? Do you only use one or the other? > > > I think it is mostly personal preference. Doctest is nice where you > create examples for others, maybe not so nice where you are creating > exhaustive unit tests trying to exercise every corner case. unittest > is perhaps easier to aggregate tests from multiple modules. Doctests > integrate with unittest in Python 2.4. Personally I use unittest but > I come from a Java background and learned TDD with JUnit which is > related to unittest.
I have recently begun a project where I am using extreme test-driven development with unittest - writing very small tests, then writing the code to make the test pass [1]. In this case much of the code is testing access to data that I read from a text file. I think these tests would make very poor doctests because - they are just exercising the accessors (attributes, actually) of a data class; they don't contribute much to understanding the class under test - they rely on test files for the data, they won't run in isolation [2] Most of my unit tests are crushingly boring reading, so for me I think unittest is a better fit. [1] I like this style in general. In this case the programming is fairly exploratory - I have to figure out what data I need from the file, then figure out how to get it - which is an excellent fit for this style of programming. I figure out one bit of data, write a test for it, write the code to access the data, repeat. [2] I know, some unit testing purists say unit tests shouldn't rely on external resources such as files and databases. I disagree :-) as long as the tests are fast I don't care what resources they use. Kent -- http://www.kentsjohnson.com _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
