62 posts tagged “testing”
2017
I’ve heard managers and teams mandating 100% code coverage for applications. That’s a really bad idea. The problem is that you get diminishing returns on our tests as the coverage increases much beyond 70% (I made that number up… no science there). Why is that? Well, when you strive for 100% all the time, you find yourself spending time testing things that really don’t need to be tested. Things that really have no logic in them at all (so any bugs could be caught by ESLint and Flow). Maintaining tests like this actually really slow you and your team down.
Cypress (via) Promising looking new open source testing framework for full-blown web integration testing—a modern alternative to Selenium. I spent five minutes playing with the demo and was really impressed by it—especially their “time travel” feature which lets you hover over a passed test and see the state of the browser when each of those assertions was executed.
2011
One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it. I've found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.
2010
Unit Testing Achievements. A plugin for Python’s nose test runner that adds achievements—“Night Shift: Make a failing suite pass between 12am and 5am.”
twitter-text-conformance (via) This is a neat idea: Twitter have released open source libraries for parsing standard tweet syntax in Ruby and Java, but they’ve also released a set of YAML unit tests aimed at anyone who wants to implement the same parsing logic in other languages.
rlisagor’s freshen. A Python clone of Ruby’s innovative Cucumber testing framework. Tests are defined as a set of plain-text scenarios, which are then executed by being matched against test functions decorated with regular expressions. Has anyone used this or Cucumber? I’m intrigued but unconvinced—are the plain text scenarios really a useful way of defining tests?
2009
There is no WebKit on Mobile. PPK ran 27 tests against 19 different WebKit-on-mobile implementations and found enormous disparities between the levels of support in currently available mobile phones.
Fabric factory. Promising looking continuous integration server written in Django, which uses Fabric scripts to define actions.
Test-Driven Heresy. Tim Bray advocates TDD for maintenance development, but argues that it may not be as useful during the exploratory, greenfield development phase of a project.
Testing Django Views for Concurrency Issues. Neat decorator for executing a Django view under high concurrency in your unit tests, to help spot errors caused by database race conditions that should be executed inside a transaction.
Nose 0.11 released. My favourite Python testing tool just got some really neat new features, including the ability to parallelize tests across multiple processes (hence CPUs) using the multiprocess module, Xunit XML output for integration with continuous integration tools and a --failed switch to re-run only the last batch of failed tests.
Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps. A classic case of a number in a title making the article look less interesting than it actually is. Lots of interesting information here from IMVU’s Eric Ries.
It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.
Changeset 9793: SMTP testing documentation. I didn’t know this trick: running “python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025” will start up a simple SMTP server which dumps received e-mails to the terminal instead of forwarding them on.
Django now has fast tests. Changeset 9756 switched Django’s TestCase class to running tests inside a transaction and rolling back at the end (instead of doing a full dump and reload). “Ellington’s test suite, which was taking around 1.5-2 hours to run on Postgres, has been reduced to 10 minutes.”
Localbuilder. Gareth Rushgrove’s neat little Python continuous integration tool—it watches a directory for changes, then runs a command when it spots any.
2008
Django snippets: RequestFactory. I’ve been wanting this for ages; when I finally got around to writing it it turned out to only be a dozen or so lines of code. Makes it easy to create mock request objects in Django, which you can then use for testing view functions directly (bypassing the current test client mechanism which requires views to be assigned to a URLconf before they can be tested).
ratproxy. “A semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool”—watches you browse and highlights potential XSS, CSRF and other vulnerabilities in your application. Created by Michal Zalewski at Google.
QUnit. The jQuery unit testing framework is now documented and supported as a separate project.
Python one-liner of the day. I love the idea of publishing one-liners accompanied by one-line test suites.
xPyUnit: Uniting in Python with XML reporting. Should be just the ticket for integrating Django’s testing framework with Cruise Control.
2007
I can't help feel that BDD is a case of a bad idea spreading; the motivations for BDD are fine (a change in developer testing workflow), but the technique they use to try to reach the desired workflow is totally bizarre.
Mock—Mocking and Test Utilities (via) New mocking library for Python based on the “action ... assertion” pattern (as opposed to the more common “record ... replay”).
Using the jQuery test suite for your own projects. jQuery’s test suite has clever start(), stop() and expect() methods for running assertions within asynchronous code.
nose 0.10.0 final! Nose is my favourite Python testing tool: it can auto-discover and execute tests in a directory hierarchy, which makes it easy to run just a sub-set of your test suite.
YUI 2.3.0. New components are a rich text editor, dojo-style package loader, lazy ImageLoader, colour picker and unit test framework. Easier skinning as well.
Test stubbing httplib2. Nice demonstration of monkey-patching as part of unit testing in Python.
The joy of pdb.set_trace(). I use nosetests --pdb-failures as my main entrypoint for Python debugging—it starts the debugger at the first failing test.
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image (via) Microsoft have made free VPC images of IE 6 and IE 7 available for testing, but they expire in August.