[Tutor] Where to start with Unit Testing

[Huy Ton That]

All these responses are incredible, I will go through them on my venture to
bring unit testing under my belt.

I have never done formal unit testing in my programming career, I've just
gone through way of general debugging and utilizing version control such as
Mercurial.

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:42 PM, David Hutto <smokefloat at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:39 PM, David Hutto <smokefloat at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:31 PM, David Hutto <smokefloat at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:11 PM, Che M <pine508 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> > The idea of unit testing/test driven development has remained
> >>>> > foreign to me throughout my time trying to learn Python--by choice.
> >>>> > I want to make desktop GUI applications and I don't use MVC, so
> >>>> > the idea of writing tests strikes me as far more work--and a major
> >>>> > delayer of getting to an application that actually does something--
> >>>> > than simply using the software myself and noting problems.  It
> >>>> > sounds like TDD is probably the most proper way to go about things,
> >>>> > but, in the interest of getting something out of Python to warrant
> the
> >>>> > time I've put into it, I favor a "good enough" approach for now.
> >>>>
> >>>> Writers just call this a rough draft. Perfection is in the revisions
> >>>> that come after a little thought.
> >>>
> >>> Well, I don't see what I'm doing as a rough draft, as I am attempting
> >>> to hone it to "perfection" (that is, a working app)--just without unit
> >>> testing.
> >>
> >> Every time you try to perfect is a revision of your initial 'written'
> >> algorithm. From concept forward is your revisions. Notice that svn and
> >> cvs are called revisions. How quickly is a different story. To you,
> >> your writing and rewriting, but each rewrite is a revision of the
> >> initial concept. And as far as i can tell, if you want to be the unit
> >> test yourself, it's fine, but unit testing might be inappropriate for
> >> something like this. But basically unit testing would be a script that
> >> inputs the possible combinations of requests to the original script,
> >> which should be tested like chefs do soups-intermittently as you
> >> design it. So the tests are really what you put or type as input given
> >> directly to the script , right?.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> A different analogy comes to my mind; I once saw two different sets of
> >>> people analyze data.  One did it "by hand":  visually inspecting
> thousands
> >>> of signals herself and typing Y or N to accept or reject each signal.
> The
> >>> other did it with an automated system that accepted or rejected signals
> >>> based on fuzzy logic.
> >>
> >> This depends on your need for control, do you need to manually accept,
> >> or can you just detect the signal, and let the program proceedl. Do
> >> you want the local nuclear plant to have their system throw an error,
> >> without a human response?
> >>
> >> In an important interpretation, the automated system
> >>> was far better, and yet the first scientist was done with her analysis
> and
> >>> accepted for publication before the second team even had the bugs
> worked
> >>> out of the automated system!
> >>
> >> Like you state below, the automated system used, evolved from manually
> >> designed systems, so automation is the easy way, but sometimes not the
> >> best, depending on the circumstance and priority level of the
> >> information being received.
> >>
> >> Yes, I think the slow-but-more-proper team
> >>> did the more correct thing, but there is something to be said for "good
> >>> enough", too (it works for evolution, for example).
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
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> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
> > Disclaimer: I have no clue what unit testing is, nor have I had to use it
> yet.
> >
>
> But it would be a series of function instances from a module, right?
> Not to butt in on the OP.
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