pypospack unit testing

In order to supportability, a large departure from pyposmat to pypospack is the inclusion of unit testing scripts. At this point, this page probably includes a lot of information which should be moved to a tutorial document. However, at this point, I'm going to leave this information as one large document until I figure out where to move information.

Introduction to Unit Testing

A good explanation of python's capabilities of unit testing can be found with the following references:

• Python Software Foundation. "unittest - United Testing Framework".

Organization of Unit Testing Code

The basic building block of unit testing code are test cases - single scenarios that must be set up and checked for correctness. In unittest, test cases are created through instances of the unittest.TestCase instances. To make test cases either the TestCase or FunctionTestCase must be subclassed.

Test Fixtures

Test cases can be organized by fixtures which they use. Test fixtures are methods and functions used before and after a test. This sets up the preconditions needed before the test and cleanup after the test is completed. Preconditioning activities are typically set up with the setUp() method to allocate, open, or connect to some resource. Cleanup, typically set up with the tearDown() method deallocates, closes, and disconnects from the resources. Since pypospack manages input/output to and from different calculators, these activities will be included in the the tearDown process.

import unittest

class WidgetTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):

        self.widget = Widget('The widget')

    def test_default_widget_size(self):

        self.assertEqual(self.widget.size(), (50,50), 'incorrect default size')

    def test_widget_resize(self):

        self.widget.resize(100,150)

        self.assertEqual(self.widget.size(), (100,150), 'wrong size after resize')

    def tearDown(self):

        # some stuff here

To run this these tests

python -m unittest -q widgettestcase.py

Test Suites

Definitions of test cases and test suites are placed in a separate module. This allows the tests to be run in standalone from the command line. The test code can be separated from the production code.

assertTrue(x, msg=None)

assertFalse(x, msg=None)

assertIsNone(x, msg=None)

assertIsNotNone(x, msg=None)

assertEqual(a, b, msg=None)

assertNotEqual(a, b, msg=None)

assertIs(a, b, msg=None)

assertIsNot(a, b, msg=None)

assertIn(a, b, msg=None)

assertNotIn(a, b, msg=None)

assertIsInstance(a, b, msg=None)

assertNotIsInstance(a, b, msg=None)