Django testing

Sandy’s great talk on test organization! I do things very similarly!

Organize and optimize your tests

  • All apps need tests

  • As your apps become more complex

    • test suite will grow larger
    • Increasingly complex test scenarios arise
    • seperate code and service/infrastructure

  • Don’t keep all your tests in one monolithic file named test.py

Don’t do this

  • Don’t have a 6000 line test.py file! Break it down into test_models, test_managers, etc.

  • Don’t test 3rd party APIs

    • Sandy prefers Mock and other faking of those systems

    • Danny: But how do you test your payment gateways and other API calls?

      • Paypal, Authorize.net
      • Github, Bitbucket, etc
      • Twilio, Tropo
      • Maybe have a stand-alone test suite called third_party_apis

Do this

sample of how I do it:

core/
    tests.py # This is where my test utils go!
myapp/
    tests/
        test_models.py
        test_views.py

I prefix my test modules with test_ so that way it is easier to identify them in various text editors. We already have enough models and views that it confuses me!

Sandy does things a bit differently, in that she calls test modules models and views. Really though, it is a measure of what you prefer for naming conventions

Dev environments and code testing

  • Services and infrastructure should not be tested in code tests
  • Code should be written to handle this sort of thing.
  • Hard to get away from.
  • Example: Multiple servers

Continuous integration

Worst Practice: Not testing

There’re lots of things you can do wrong in testing

  • Not having them
  • Writing them badly