5.2.1 Organizing test code

The basic building blocks of unit testing are test cases -- single scenarios that must be set up and checked for correctness. In PyUnit, test cases are represented by instances of the TestCase class in the unittest module. To make your own test cases you must write subclasses of TestCase, or use FunctionTestCase.

An instance of a TestCase-derived class is an object that can completely run a single test method, together with optional set-up and tidy-up code.

The testing code of a TestCase instance should be entirely self contained, such that it can be run either in isolation or in arbitrary combination with any number of other test cases.

The simplest test case subclass will simply override the runTest() method in order to perform specific testing code:

import unittest

class DefaultWidgetSizeTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def runTest(self):
        widget = Widget("The widget")
        self.failUnless(widget.size() == (50,50), 'incorrect default size')

Note that in order to test something, we use the one of the assert*() or fail*() methods provided by the TestCase base class. If the test fails when the test case runs, an exception will be raised, and the testing framework will identify the test case as a failure. Other exceptions that do not arise from checks made through the assert*() and fail*() methods are identified by the testing framework as dfnerrors.

The way to run a test case will be described later. For now, note that to construct an instance of such a test case, we call its constructor without arguments:

testCase = DefaultWidgetSizeTestCase()

Now, such test cases can be numerous, and their set-up can be repetitive. In the above case, constructing a ``Widget'' in each of 100 Widget test case subclasses would mean unsightly duplication.

Luckily, we can factor out such set-up code by implementing a method called setUp(), which the testing framework will automatically call for us when we run the test:

import unittest

class SimpleWidgetTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.widget = Widget("The widget")

class DefaultWidgetSizeTestCase(SimpleWidgetTestCase):
    def runTest(self):
        self.failUnless(self.widget.size() == (50,50),
                        'incorrect default size')

class WidgetResizeTestCase(SimpleWidgetTestCase):
    def runTest(self):
        self.widget.resize(100,150)
        self.failUnless(self.widget.size() == (100,150),
                        'wrong size after resize')

If the setUp() method raises an exception while the test is running, the framework will consider the test to have suffered an error, and the runTest() method will not be executed.

Similarly, we can provide a tearDown() method that tidies up after the runTest() method has been run:

import unittest

class SimpleWidgetTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.widget = Widget("The widget")

    def tearDown(self):
        self.widget.dispose()
        self.widget = None

If setUp() succeeded, the tearDown() method will be run regardless of whether or not runTest() succeeded.

Such a working environment for the testing code is called a fixture.

Often, many small test cases will use the same fixture. In this case, we would end up subclassing SimpleWidgetTestCase into many small one-method classes such as DefaultWidgetSizeTestCase. This is time-consuming and discouraging, so in the same vein as JUnit, PyUnit provides a simpler mechanism:

import unittest

class WidgetTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.widget = Widget("The widget")

    def tearDown(self):
        self.widget.dispose()
        self.widget = None

    def testDefaultSize(self):
        self.failUnless(self.widget.size() == (50,50),
                        'incorrect default size')

    def testResize(self):
        self.widget.resize(100,150)
        self.failUnless(self.widget.size() == (100,150),
                        'wrong size after resize')

Here we have not provided a runTest() method, but have instead provided two different test methods. Class instances will now each run one of the test*() methods, with self.widget created and destroyed separately for each instance. When creating an instance we must specify the test method it is to run. We do this by passing the method name in the constructor:

defaultSizeTestCase = WidgetTestCase("testDefaultSize")
resizeTestCase = WidgetTestCase("testResize")

Test case instances are grouped together according to the features they test. PyUnit provides a mechanism for this: the test suite, represented by the class TestSuite in the unittest module:

widgetTestSuite = unittest.TestSuite()
widgetTestSuite.addTest(WidgetTestCase("testDefaultSize"))
widgetTestSuite.addTest(WidgetTestCase("testResize"))

For the ease of running tests, as we will see later, it is a good idea to provide in each test module a callable object that returns a pre-built test suite:

def suite():
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    suite.addTest(WidgetTestCase("testDefaultSize"))
    suite.addTest(WidgetTestCase("testResize"))
    return suite

or even:

class WidgetTestSuite(unittest.TestSuite):
    def __init__(self):
        unittest.TestSuite.__init__(self,map(WidgetTestCase,
                                              ("testDefaultSize",
                                               "testResize")))

(The latter is admittedly not for the faint-hearted!)

Since it is a common pattern to create a TestCase subclass with many similarly named test functions, there is a convenience function called makeSuite() provided in the unittest module that constructs a test suite that comprises all of the test cases in a test case class:

suite = unittest.makeSuite(WidgetTestCase,'test')

Note that when using the makeSuite() function, the order in which the various test cases will be run by the test suite is the order determined by sorting the test function names using the cmp() built-in function.

Often it is desirable to group suites of test cases together, so as to run tests for the whole system at once. This is easy, since TestSuite instances can be added to a TestSuite just as TestCase instances can be added to a TestSuite:

suite1 = module1.TheTestSuite()
suite2 = module2.TheTestSuite()
alltests = unittest.TestSuite((suite1, suite2))

You can place the definitions of test cases and test suites in the same modules as the code they are to test (e.g. widget.py), but there are several advantages to placing the test code in a separate module, such as widgettests.py:

The test module can be run standalone from the command line.
The test code can more easily be separated from shipped code.
There is less temptation to change test code to fit the code. it tests without a good reason.
Test code should be modified much less frequently than the code it tests.
Tested code can be refactored more easily.
Tests for modules written in C must be in separate modules anyway, so why not be consistent?
If the testing strategy changes, there is no need to change the source code.

See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.