[Deepsea-users] Choosing unittesting frameworks

[Joshua Schmid]

Hey list,

first of all I'd like to get the terminology straight.

We use 'tox' serves us as a virtualenv manager and allows us:

* checking your package installs correctly with different Python
versions and interpreters
* running your tests in each of the environments, configuring your test
tool of choice
* acting as a frontend to Continuous Integration servers, greatly
reducing boilerplate and merging CI and shell-based testing.

tox internally executes 'pytest' which acts currently (for us) as a
testcollector that scans directories for 'test_*' files or methods
starting with 'test_'.

pytest could be replaced with nosetests but after reading some articles
pytest seem to have more functionality and a bigger user-base.

pytest does not solely act act as a testcollector and runner, but is
also a full-fledged unittest framework.

as we are moving towards more unittesting, we should agree _now_ on one
framework. I for example picked the native python 'unittest' library
because it's widespread and has a rather complete documentation.

Abhi otoh went for 'pytest'. After some reading I see some benefits in
also switching to it.

benefits suchs as:

* writing setup_functions for specific blocks of tests rather than for
an entire test class.
* less boilerplate assert vs self.asserTrue(e.g)


we also will use mocking quite extensively. We have only one options
here: Mock, which is a standalone lib in py2.7 but was adopted in the
native unittest lib in py3.x. (There is also a thin wrapper for pytest
called pytest-mocker but this is out of scope here I guess.)

I don't have a strong opinion because I basically just started reading..
If anyone has a profound python background, please speak up now :)

I currently lean towards pytest + mock.

Thoughts?

-- 
Freundliche Grüße - Kind regards,
Joshua Schmid
SUSE Enterprise Storage
SUSE Linux GmbH - Maxfeldstr. 5 - 90409 Nürnberg
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