Test & Code

"Code is read much more often than it is written." - Guido van Rossum  This is true for both production code and test code. When you are trying to understand why a test is failing, you'll be very grateful to the test author if they've taken the care to make it readable. David Seddon came up with 6 principles to help us write more readable tests.  We discuss these, as well as more benefits of reada...

In both unittest and pytest, when a test function hits a failing assert, the test stops and is marked as a failed test.  What if you want to keep going, and check more things?  There are a few ways. One of them is subtests. Python's unittest introduced subtests in Python 3.4.  pytest introduced support for subtests with changes in pytest 4.4 and a plugin, called pytest-subtests.  Subtests are stil...

Django supports testing out of the box with some cool extensions to unittest. However, many people are using pytest for their Django testing, mostly using the pytest-django plugin. Adam Parkin, who is known online as CodependentCodr , joins us to talk about migrating an existing Django project from unittest to pytest. Adam tells us just how easy this is. Special Guest: Adam Parkin. Links: Django T...

Financial services have their own unique testing development challenges. But they also have lots of the same challenges as many other software projects.  Eric Bergemann joins Brian Okken to discuss: Specific testing challenges in the financial services domain CI/CD : Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment TDD : Test Driven Development Confidence from testable applications Testing strategies...

Apache Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.  PySpark blends the powerful Spark big data processing engine with the Python programming language to provide a data analysis platform that can scale up for nearly any task. Johnathan Rioux, author of "PySpark in Action", joins the show and gives us a great introduction of Spark and PySpark to help us decide how to get sta...

Hypothesis is the Python tool used for property based testing.  Hypothesis claims to combine "human understanding of your problem domain with machine intelligence to improve the quality of your testing process while spending less time writing tests." In this episode Alexander Hultnér introduces us to property based testing in Python with Hypothesis. Some topics covered: What is property based test...

IDEs can help people with automated testing. In this episode, Paul Everitt and Brian discuss ways IDEs can encourage testing and make it easier for everyone, including beginners. We discuss features that exist and are great, as well as what is missing. The conversation also includes topics around being welcoming to new contributors for both open source and professional projects. We talk about a lo...

The Test Anything Protocol, or TAP, is a way to record test results in a language agnostic way, predates XML by about 10 years, and is still alive and kicking. Matt Layman has contributed to Python in many ways, including his educational newsletter, and his Django podcast, Django Riffs. Matt is also the maintainer of tap.py and pytest-tap, two tools that bring the Test Anything Protocol to Python....

pytest is awesome by itself. pytest + plugins is even better.  In this episode, Anthony Sottile and Brian Okken discuss the top 28 pytest plugins. Some of the plugins discussed (we also mention a few plugins related to some on this list):  pytest-cov  pytest-timeout  pytest-xdist  pytest-mock  pytest-runner  pytest-instafail  pytest-django  pytest-html  pytest-metadata pytest-asyncio pytest-split-...

Django is without a doubt one of the most used web frameworks for Python. Lacey Williams Henschel is a Django consultant and has joined me to talk about Django, the Django community, and so much more. Topics: Django The Django Community Django Girls Django Girls Tutorial DjangoCon Software Testing Using tests during learning pytest-django testing Django Wagtail Special Guest: Lacey Williams Hensch...

Harry Percival has completed his second book, "Architecture Patterns with Python".  So of course we talk about the book, also known as "Cosmic Python".  We also discuss lots of testing topics, especially related to larger systems and systems involving third party interfaces and APIs. Topics  Harry's new book, "Architecture Patterns with Python". a.k.a. Cosmic Python  TDD : Test Driven Development...

Application security is best designed into a system from the start.  Anthony Shaw is doing something about it by creating an editor plugin that actually helps you write more secure application code while you are coding. On today's Test & Code, Anthony and I discuss his security plugin, but also application security in general, as well as other security components you need to consider. Security...

Let's say you have a web application and you want to make some changes to improve it.  You may want to A/B test it first to make sure you are really improving things. But really what is A/B testing?  That's what we'll find out on this episode with Leemay Nassery. Special Guest: Leemay Nassery.

I play a form of group chess that has some interesting analogies to software development and maintenance of existing systems. This episode explains group chess and explores a few of those analogies.

pytest-testmon is a pytest plugin which selects and executes only tests you need to run. It does this by collecting dependencies between tests and all executed code (internally using Coverage.py) and comparing the dependencies against changes. testmon updates its database on each test execution, so it works independently of version control. In this episode, I talk with testmon creator Tibor Arpas...

This episode is not just a look back on 2019, and a look forward to 2020.  Also, 2019 is the end of an amazingly transofrmative decade for me, so I'm going to discuss that as well. top 10 episodes of 2019 10: episode 46 , Testing Hard To Test Applications - Anthony Shaw 9: episode 64 , Practicing Programming to increase your value 8: episode 70 , Learning Software without a CS degree - Dane Hillar...

Pipelines are used a lot in software projects to automated much of the work around build, test, deployment and more. Thomas Eckert talks with me about pipelines, specifically Azure Pipelines. Some of the history, and how we can use pipelines for modern Python projects. Special Guest: Thomas Eckert. Links: click repo Azure Pipelines Action · Actions · GitHub Marketplace

Data science and machine learning are affecting more of our lives every day. Decisions based on data science and machine learning are heavily dependent on the quality of the data, and the quality of the data pipeline. Some of the software in the pipeline can be tested to some extent with traditional testing tools, like pytest. But what about the data? The data entering the pipeline, and at various...

You've applied for a job, maybe lots of jobs.  Depending on the company, you've gotta get through: a resume review a coding challange a phone screen maybe another code example an in person interview If you get the job, and you enjoy the work, awesome, congratulations. If you don't get the job, it'd be really great to know why. Sometimes it isn't because you aren't a skilled engineer. What other re...

Andy Knight is the Automation Panda.  Andy Knight is passionate about software testing, and shares his passion through public speaking, writing on automationpanda.com, teaching as an adjunct professor, and now also through writing a book and organizing a new regional Python conference. Topics of this episode include: Andy's book on software testing Being an adjunct professor Public speaking and pr...

Cristian Medina wrote an article recently called "Test Engineering Anti-Patterns: Destroy Your Customer Satisfaction and Crater Your Quality By Using These 9 Easy Organizational Practices" Of course, it's sarcastic, and aims to highlight many problems with organizational practices that reduce software quality. The article doesn't go out of character, and only promotes the anti-patterns.  However,...

Python 3.8.0 final is live and ready to download. On todays episode, we're going to run through what's new, picking out the bits that I think are the most interesting and affect the most people, including new language features standard library changes optimizations in 3.8 Not just the big stuff everyone's already talking about. But also some little things that will make programming Python even mor...

pytest 5.2 was just released, and with it, a cool fun feature called dynamic scope fixtures. Anthony Sottile so tilly is one of the pytest core developers, so I thought it be fun to have Anthony describe this new feature for us. We also talk about parametrized testing and really what is fixture scope and then what is dynamic scope. Special Guest: Anthony Sottile. Links: pytest changelog pytest fix...

Nicholas Tollervey is working toward better ways of teaching programming. His projects include the Mu Editor, PyperCard, and CodeGrades. Many of us talk about problems with software education. Nicholas is doing something about it. Special Guest: Nicholas Tollervey. Links: Code With Mu — a simple Python editor for beginner programmers Made With Mu — A blog to celebrate projects that use the Mu Pyth...

Tools like error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance monitoring are tools to help you create a better user experience and are fast becoming crucial tools for web development and site reliability. But really what are they? And when do you need them? You've built a cool web app or service, and you want to make sure your customers have a great experience. You know I advocate for utilizing au...