[Zope-dev] Zope unit testing framework?

[Toby Dickenson]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:23:02 +0100, Martijn Faassen
<faassen@vet.uu.nl> wrote:

>Hi there,
>
>Recently I've been reading some books [1] which put emphasis on the idea
>of unit testing. At the Python conference Joel Shprentz held a short talk
>about doing unit tests in Python [2]

Here is the basis of the strategy my team has been using for the last
few months...

1. Do as much 'hard work' as possible in python modules that are not
zope specific. Test these independantly from zope. ZCatalog is a good
example of how this approach looks.

2. If there is some 'hard work' that can not be made zope-independant,
then expose elemental segments of work in their own methods, then
exercise these methods using xmlrpclib, urllib, or httplib. I consider
this 'all model, no view', but the authors of [3] might disagree. If
you find this type of unit grows beyond 'small' then we have preferred
to split it into two units, factoring out a zope-indepenent core.

3. Make sure you have a good separation of functionality from
presentation. This is recycling old advice, but its worth stating how
it applies to testing: Presentation should be testable by eyeballs
alone. So far this item has been the hardest to follow.


>Doing unit tests in Python isn't hard to do.

Python is the most unit-test-friendly language I know.

>Regards,
>
>Martijn

Thanks for starting an interesting thread.

>[1]
>Martin Fowler, ed., Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code,
>Addison Wesley Longman, 1999
>
>Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999
>
>[2]
>http://www.python.org/workshops/2000-01/proceedings/posters/shprentz/shprentz.pdf
>http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonUnit
>
>[3]
>http://www.zope.org/Resources/Mozilla/ZWiki/ZopeMVC
>http://www.zope.org/Resources/Mozilla/ZWiki/ModelViewController
>


Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com