[Python-Dev] How far to go with user-friendliness

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 09:53:33AM -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:
> Part of writing tests is making sure they fail (and for the right reason) -- proper testing of the tests would reveal such a typo.

And there are other failure modes for writing tests that succeed but
are not testing what you think.  For example, you might re-use the
same method name:

   def test_connection(self):
       # Never executed
       ...

   ... 200 lines and 10 other test methods later ...

   def test_connection(self):
       ...

Or misuse assertRaises:

   with self.assertRaises(TypeError):
       1 + "a"
       # Second statement never reached
       [] + 'b'

I don't think unittest can protect its users from such things.

--amk