Test & Code

When you are teaching someone web development skills, when is the right time to start teaching code quality and testing practices? Karl Stolley believes it's never too early. Let's hear how he incorporates code quality in his courses. Our discussion includes: starting people off with good dev practices and tools linting html and css validation visual regression testing using local dev servers, inc...

Being productive is obviously a good thing.  Can we measure it?  Should we measure it?  There's been failed attempts, like lines of code, etc. in the past.  Currently, there are new tools to measure productivity, like using git metrics. Nick Hodges joins the show to discuss the good and the bad of developer and team productivity, including how we can improve productivity.

Django has a handful of console commands to help manage and develop sites.   django-rich adds color and nice formatting. Super cool. In a recent release, django-rich also adds nice colorized tracebacks to the Django test runner.  Links: django-rich · PyPI episode 181: Boost Your Django DX - Adam Johnson django-crispy-forms Python Developers Survey 2020 Results 

Twisted has been supporting asynchronous / event driven applications way before asyncio. Twisted, and Glyph, have also been encouraging automated tests for a very long time. Twisted uses a technique that should be usable by other applications, even those using asyncio or other event driven architectures. Links: Community Service Award Recipient Glyph Lefkowitz — The PSF article I was referring to...

Ryan Cheley joins me today to talk about some challenges of managing software teams, and how to handle them.  We end up talking about a lot of skills that are excellent for software engineers as well as managers. Some topics discussed: handling code reviews asking good questions being honest about what you can't do with current resources and data discussing tradeoffs and offering solutions that ca...

Don't you just love technical interviews, with someone who just saw your resume or CV 5 minutes ago asking you to write some code on a whiteboard. Probably code that has nothing to do with anything you've done before or anything you will do at the company. No? Neither does Nathan Aschbacher.   So when he started building the team at his company, he decided to do things differently. Hiring is one o...

We talk with Adam Johnson about his new book, "Boost Your Django DX".  Developer experience includes tools and practices to make developers more effective and efficient, and just plain make software development more fun and satisfying.   One of the things I love about this book is that it's not just for Django devs.   I'd guess that about half the book is about topics that all Python developers wo...

Lean TDD is an attempt to reconcile some conflicting aspects of Test Driven Development and Lean Software Development. I've mentioned Lean TDD on the podcast a few times and even tried to do a quick outline at the end of episode 162 . This episode is a more complete outline, or at least a first draft. If you feel you've got a good understanding of TDD, and it's working awesome for you, that's grea...

Exploratory testing is absolutely an essential part of a testing strategy.  This episode discusses what exploratory testing is, its benefits, and how it fits within a framework of relying on automated tests for most of our testing.

"There are five practical reasons that we write tests. Whether we realize it or not, our personal testing philosophy is based on how we judge the relative importance of these reasons." - Sarah Mei This episode discusses the factors. Sarah's order: Verify the code is working correctly Prevent future regressions Document the code’s behavior Provide design guidance Support refactoring Brian's order:...

A recent Twitter thread by Simon Willison reminded me that I've been meaning to do an episode on the testing trophy.  This discussion is about the distinction between unit and integration tests, what those terms mean, and where we should spend our testing time. Links: Simon Willison's Twitter Thread The Testing Trophy and Testing Classifications — Kent C Dodds Write tests. Not too many. Mostly int...

The idea of having a software as a service product sound great, doesn't it?  Solve a problem with software. Have a nice looking landing page and website. Get paying customers.  Eventually have it make enough revenue so you can turn it into your primary source of income.  There's a lot of software talent out there. We could solve lots of problems.   But going from idea to product to first customer...

Who should do QA? How does that change with different projects and teams? What does "doing QA" mean, anyway? Answering these questions are the goals of this episode. Links: Test Automation - Who Should be Involved? | Thoughtworks

In this episode, I talk with Paul Ganssle about a fun workflow that he calls pseudo-TDD.  Pseudo-TDD is a way to keep your commit history clean and your tests passing with each commit.  This workflow includes using pytest xfail and some semi-advanced version control features. Some strict forms of TDD include something like this: write a failing test that demonstrates a lacking feature or defect wr...

In the preface of "Python Testing with pytest" I list some reasons to use pytest, under a section called "why pytest?". Someone asked me recently, a different but related question "why NOT unittest?". unittest is an xUnit style framework. For me, xUnit style frameworks are fatally flawed for software testing. That's what this episode is about, my opinion of  "Why NOT unittest?", or more broadly, ...

A prototype is a a preliminary model of something, from which other forms are developed or copied.  In software, we think of prototypes as early things, or a proof of concept.  We don't often think of prototyping during daily software development or maintenance. I think we should.  This episode is about growing better designed software with the help of a prototype mindset. Links: Selecting a progr...

Paul Ganssle, is a software developer at Google, core Python dev, and open source maintainer for many projects, has some thoughts about pytest's xfail.  He was an early skeptic of using xfail, and is now an proponent of the feature.  In this episode, we talk about some open source workflows that are possible because of xfail.  Special Guest: Paul Ganssle. Links: How and why I use pytest's xfail —...

Prayson Daniel, a principle data scientist, discusses testing machine learning pipelines with pytest. Prayson is using pytest for some pretty cool stuff, including: unit tests, of course testing pipeline stages counterfactual testing performance testing All with pytest. So cool. Special Guest: Prayson Daniel. Links: Python Bytes 250, with Prayson Daniel — Listen to this for more of an introduction...

Performance monitoring and error detection is just as important with services and microservices as with any system, but with added complexity. Omri Sass joins the show to explain telemetry and monitoring of services and of systems with services.  Special Guest: Omri Sass.

To understand complex code, it can be helpful to remove abstractions, even if it results in larger functions. This episode walks through a process I use to refactor code that I need to debug and fix, but don't completely understand.

Paul has a tutorial on testing and TDD with React and TypeScript.   We discuss workflow and the differences, similarities between testing with React/TypeScript and Python.  We also discuss what lessons that we can bring from front end testing to Python testing. Special Guest: Paul Everitt. Links: React, TypeScript, and TDD — Paul Everitt's tutorial React Testing Library

xfail isn't just for pytest tests. Python's unittest has @unittest.expectedFailure. In this episode, we cover: using @unittest.expectedFailure the results of passing and failing tests with expectedFailure using pytest as a test runner for unittest using pytest markers on unittest tests Docs for expectedFailure:   https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html#skipping-tests-and-expected-failures...

A discussion of how to use the xfail feature of pytest to help with communication on software projects. The episode covers: What is xfail Why I use it Using reason effectively by including issue tracking numbers Using xfail_strict Adding --runxfail when transitioning from development to feature freeze What to do about test failures How all of this might help with team communication

An overview of the pytest flags that help with debugging.  From Chapter 13, Debugging Test Failures, of Python Testing with pytest, 2nd edition . pytest includes quite a few command-line flags that are useful for debugging.  We talk about thes flags in this episode. Flags for selecting which tests to run, in which order, and when to stop: -lf / --last-failed: Runs just the tests that failed last....

pip : "pip installs packages" or maybe "Package Installer for Python"  pip is an invaluable tool when developing with Python.  A lot of people know pip as a way to install third party packages from pypi.org  You can also use pip to install from other indexes (or is it indices?) You can also use pip to install a package in a local directory.  That's the part I want to jump in and explore with Stéph...