FOSS World News: Testing Your Code with Python's pytest

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Testing Your Code with Python's pytest

Don't test your code? pytest removes any excuses.

Software developers don't just write software; they also use software. So, they're the first to recognize, and understand, that software is complex and inevitably contains bugs.

But, just because bugs are inevitable doesn't mean that developers can or should try to prevent them. And, thus, during the past few decades, there's been rapid growth in software testing. Testing is no longer seen as an optional or "nice to have" part of software development; it's considered an absolute must—part of the software development process. In many cases, the people in the Python courses I teach at various companies aren't developers per se, but instead testers—people with the full-time job of writing tests to ensure that the company's software is robust.

I must admit that even though I've been writing software for a long time, I have rarely been as good about testing as I'd like to be. Sure, when I'm working on a large, complex app, I'll write tests, but it always seemed to be a bit of a burden. I know that it's good for me, will save tons of time in the future, will make the software more robust and maintenance easier, but really, if I just want to get my program out the door, why test? And besides, the various test frameworks I've used through the years never struck me as very impressive or easy to use.

So for the past few years, I've been in a bit of a holding pattern. I want to test more, but testing is annoying, so I don't test, which makes it seem like even more of a burden, because it's not part of my regular process.

All of this has changed for me recently, thanks to my discovery (long after other people, I admit) of the pytest library for Python. pytest turns out to be easy to use, easy to work with and easy to integrate into my work. Part of the reason for this is that pytest abandons the Python idea of "there's only one way to do it", giving developers a great degree of flexibility and freedom in choosing how to write tests.

So in this article, I provide an introduction to pytest, showing how to start integrating it into your development process today. I plan to expand on this in my next article and describe some more advanced pytest features that you might need to use.

Basic pytest

The idea behind pytest is that if you want to test a function, you'll write a separate function to test it. Actually, you'll probably want to write more than one test function, but that's in addition.

For example, let's assume you have the following function that sums numbers:

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