Test & Code

There are a lot of learning styles and a lot of ways to learn Python. If you started Python through a class at work, or through an online course, or maybe an email series, it's possibly you may have learned from Reuven Lerner. If your first encounter with pytest was reading an article in Linux Journal recently, that would be the writing of Reuven. Reuven Lerner teaches Python. This interview defin...

A look back on 3 years of podcasting, and a bit of a look forward to what to expect in 2019. Top 5 episodes: 2: Pytest vs Unittest vs Nose 33: Katharine Jarmul - Testing in Data Science 18: Testing in Startups and Hiring Software Engineers with Joe Stump 45: David Heinemeier Hansson - Software Development and Testing, TDD, and exploratory QA 27: Mahmoud Hashemi : unit, integration, and system test...

Julian Sequeira is Co-Founder of PyBit.es (a blog/platform created to teach and learn Python) and a Python Trainer at Talk Python Training. He's also a survivor of the 100DaysOfCode in Python Challenge. We talk about the 100 days challenge, about learning Python, and about how cool it is to learn within a community. Special Guest: Julian Sequeira. Links: PyBites Blog PyBites Code Challenges Platfo...

Thea Flowers is a Pythonista and open source advocate. She helps empower developers of all backgrounds and experience levels using Python and open source software and hardware. Thea is the creator of Nox, the co-chair of PyCascades 2019, the lead maintainer of urllib3, and a member of the Python Packaging Authority and Packaging Working Group. Thea works on Google Cloud Platform's wonderful Develo...

Let's say you've got a web application you need to test. It has a REST API that you want to use for testing. Can you use Python for this testing even if the application is written in some other language? Of course. Can you use pytest? duh. yes. what else? What if you want to spin up docker instances, get your app running in that, and run your tests against that environment? How would you use pytes...

Data science, data engineering, data analysis, and machine learning are part of the recent massive growth of Python. But really what is data science? Vicki Boykis helps me understand questions like: No really, what is data science? What does a data pipeline look like? What is it like to do data science, data analysis, data engineering? Can you do analysis on a laptop? How big does data have to be...

Michael Kennedy of Talk Python and Python Bytes fame joins Brian to talk about being a great guest and what to expect. Even if you have never wanted to be on a podcast, you might learn some great tips. A few of the things we talk about will be helpful for other endeavors, like public speaking, guest blog posts, look for unsolicited job opportunities. Some people have never been on a podcast before...

What happens when 100% test code coverage just isn't enough. In this episode, we talk with Mahmoud Hashemi about glom, a very cool project in itself, but a project that needs more coverage than 100%. This problem affects lots of projects that use higher level programming constructs, like domain specific languages (DSLs), sub languages mini languages, compilers, and db query languages. Also covered...

Paul talks about the beginning years of Python. Talking about Python's beginnings is also talking about the Python community beginnings. Yes, it's reminiscing, but it's fun. Special Guest: Paul Everitt. Links: Python 1994 Panel Discussion PyCon 2017 "Python 1994", PyBay2017 Spam, Spam, Spam, ...

Luc Perkins joins the show to talk about "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A guide to modern databases and the NoSQL movement." We discuss a bit about each database: Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Postgres, and DynamoDB. Special Guest: Luc Perkins. Links: Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, Second Edition: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement PostgreSQL Redis Neo4j Graph Database...

Brett Cannon discusses the changes afoot in Python packaging as a result of PEP 517, PEP 518, starting with "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?" Discussed: flit Poetry tox Continuous Integration setup.py, MANIFEST.in, etc. pipenv what's with lock files applications (doesn't go on PyPI) vs libraries (goes on PyPI) workflows dependency resolution deployment dependencies vs development de...

Andy Knight joins me in discussing the concept of feature testing. A feature tests is "a test verifying a service or library as the customer would use it, but within a single process." That was a quote from an article that appeared on the Twitter engineering blog. The article describes a shift away from class tests towards feature tests, the benefits of the shift, and some reactions to it. Feature...

Anthony Shaw joins Brian to discuss flaky tests and flaky test suites. What are flaky tests? Is it the same as fragile tests? Why are they bad? How do we deal with them? What causes flakiness? How can we fix them? How can we avoid them? Proactively rooting out flakiness Test design GUI tests Sharing solutions Special Guest: Anthony Shaw. Links: Dropbox article on flaky tests Microsoft article on f...

tox is a simple yet powerful tool that is used by many Python projects. tox is not just a tool to help you test a Python project against multiple versions of Python. In this interview, Oliver and Brian just scratch the surface of this simple yet powerful automation tool. This is from the tox documentation: tox is a generic virtualenv management and test command line tool you can use for: checking...

The story of how I came to find a good user interface for running and debugging automated tests is interleaved with a multi-year effort of mine to have a test workflow that’s works smoothly with product development and actually speeds things up. It’s also interleaved with the origins of the blog pythontesting.net, this podcast, and the pytest book I wrote with Pragmatic. It’s not a long story. And...

Interview with Andy Knight, the Automation Panda. Selenium & WebDriver Headless Chrome Gherkin BDD Given When Then pytest-bdd PyCharm Writing Good Gherkin Overhead of Gherkin and if it's worth it When to use pytest vs pytest-bdd The art of test automation Special Guest: Andy Knight. Links: Automation Panda | A blog for software development and testing Karate REST API test framework BDD | Autom...

How do you write tests for things that aren’t that easy to write tests for? That question is a possibly terrible summary of a question sent to me by a listener. And to help me start answering that question, I asked a friend of mine to help, Antony Shaw. Of course, different types of applications have different test strategies, so there’s not a universal answer. But I know some of you out there hav...

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, founder & CTO at Basecamp (formerly 37signals). He's a best selling author, public speaker, and even a Le Mans class winning racing driver. All of that, of course, is awesome. But that's not why I asked him on the show. In 2014, during a RailsConf keynote, he started a discussion about damage caused by TDD. This was followed by a few bl...

Nina Zakharenko is a cloud developer advocate at Microsoft focusing on Python. She's also an excellent public speaker. We talk about her experience with mentoring, both being a mentor, and utilizing mentors. We also talk about public speaking, her move to Microsoft, and to Portland, and the Microsoft/GitHub merge. Special Guest: Nina Zakharenko. Links: The Recurse Center Why I joined Microsoft – H...

After I had wrapped up the interview with Kelsey Hightower for episode 43 , I asked him one last question. You see, I admire the his presentation style. So I asked him if he would share with me how he prepared for his presentations. His answer is so thoughtful and makes so much sense, I couldn't keep it to myself. I'm releasing this as a bonus mini-episode so that it's easy to refer back to the ne...

I first heard Kelsey speak during his 2017 PyCon keynote. He's an amazing speaker, and I knew right then I wanted to hear more about what he does and hear more of his story. We discuss testing, of course, but we take it further and discuss: tests for large systems, like kubernetes Testing in real world scenarios with all the configuration and everything Becoming a complete engineer by thinking abo...

This interview with Trey Hunner discusses his use of automated tests to help teach programming. Automated testing is a huge part of developing great software. But many new developers don't get exposed to testing for quite a while. But this is changing. New ways to teach programming include automated tests from the beginning. Trey Hunner is one of the PSF directors and a Python and Django team trai...

We talk with Anthony Shaw about some of the testing problems facing both DevOps teams, and Agile teams. We also talk about his recent pull request accepted into pytest. Special Guest: Anthony Shaw. Links: Anthony Shaw on github.io Support for the new builtin breakpoint function in Python 3.7 by tonybaloney · Pull Request #3331 · pytest-dev/pytest

Adam is the host of The Gently Mad podcast, and teaches the steps in creating and growing a podcast in his course Irresistible Podcasting . He was one of the people who inspired Brian to get the Test & Code podcast started in the first place. Brian took his course in 2015. Adam is in the process of updating the course, and building a community around it. Warning: This may be an episode to list...

Complete and exhaustive testing is not possible. Nor would it be fun, or maintainable, or a good use of your time. However, some functionality is important enough to make sure the test behavior coverage is thorough enough to have high confidence in it's quality. In this episode, we discuss 3 techniques that can be combined to quickly generate test cases. We then talk about how to implement them ef...