On Apr 23, 2008, at 4:19 PM, Marius Gedminas wrote:
Suppose I find a bug (say, zope.testing.testrunner.StartUpFailure
objects make unittest.TextTestRunner cry). Being a good developer I
want to start the bug fix with a unit test.
Now if zope.testing used old-style isolated unit tests, I could open
the
tests.py (or tests/test_testrunner.py) in a text editor and start
writing:
class OptionsStub(object):
post_mortem = False
def doctest_StartUpFailure():
"""Test that StartUpFailure is a proper unittest.TestCase
StartUpFailure is a TestCase-lookalike that is inserted into
the
test suite to indicate that a failed import of a test module
won't be unnoticed.
from zope.testing.testrunner import StartUpFailure
options = OptionsStub()
module_name = 'test_me'
exc_info = (ImportError, ImportError('zonkulator'), None)
test = StartUpFailure(options, module_name, exc_info)
unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(test)
This is a regression test for http://launchpad.net/bugs/221151
"""
There, I'm almost done. Now I can fix the bug and paste the correct
output into the doctest.
But zope.testing uses narrative doctests instead of isolated unit
tests.
There are 22 plain-text files that together comprise over 4500 lines
of
text. Now instead of mechanically opening the appropriate test module
and grepping for the class/function name I have to figure out which of
the txt files is the appropriate place for the new test. After that I
have to figure out how to insert it into the narrative seamlessly. Or
decide to create a new file---but a hundred of .txt files each 20-
lines
long is not a good idea, in my opinion.
Suddenly I almost don't want to fix the bug any more.
You don't have to modify any narrative tests. You can add isolated
tests to your heart's content. Just add tests to tests.py. These can
be isolated doctests or unit tests, although I prefer the former. I
haven't done this yet in zope.testing, but I have in lots of other
projects.
See, for example:
http://svn.zope.org/zc.buildout/trunk/src/zc/buildout/tests.py?rev=85041&view=auto
I like narrative tests when the tests are reasonably a part of a
story. Not all tests are, or many tests are there own stories unto
themselves. In cases like this, small isolated tests are a lot better.
Jim
--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation
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