Many folks use Python's unittest module for integration testing. It sometimes leads to whining and hand-wringing, but it is very effective. Ordinary "unit" tests use mocks and focus on a class or a module more-or-less in isolation. The purists say "complete isolation". But that's sometimes unrealistic. A class that's part …

See "Commenting the Code".

This posting tickled my fancy because it addressed the central issue of "what requires comments outside Python docstrings". All functions, classes, modules and packages require docstrings. That's clear. But which lines of code require additional documentation?

We use Sphinx, so we make extensive use of docstrings …

I can't say enough good things about TDD.

But I'll try.

Due to an epic failure to read the documentation (this, specifically) I couldn't get our RESTful web services to work in Apache.

The entire application system has pretty good test coverage. I use the Python unittest to do integration …

I haven't written new C code since the turn of the millennium. Since then it's been almost all Java and Python. Along with Java and Python come JUnit and Python's unittest module.

I've grown completely dependent on unit testing.

I'm looking at some C code, and I want a unit …

Unit test coverage is a politically sensitive issue.

If you don't like (or want) unit testing, you set the threshold really high. 100% code coverage, or worse, 100% logic path coverage. Since these goals are difficult to achieve, the whole unit testing business can be made to go away.

If …

Check out this StackOverflow "question": Does anyone have metrics on the utility of formal Unit Testing? . While -- technically -- it does have a question, it's more of a rant against formal unit testing than a proper question.

Here's the conflation comment. "I've worked with developers who never caught any errors in …

Here's a recipe for transforming a pile of similarly-formatted source spreadsheets into a suite of unittest test cases.

The customer sent a screen grab from an accounting desktop application with a couple of rows highlighted. They claim that the application I reverse engineered from C and rewrote in Java didn't work for this one case.

Step 1. Get clarification on the screen grab information. The data labels don't …

First, read Bach's Heuristic Risk-Based Testing . Clear and simple.

Then, read Amland and Garborgsv Risk-Based Testing and Metrics . Not so clear -- probability gets folded in, confusing the issue. Also check out Schaefer's Risk-Based Testing . Probabilities are waved around like they're important. They aren't.

Risk management shouldn’t be confused with …

Here's what's great about Django coupled with the Django-REST Interface : It's almost all model. You define the model, write some tests. Add the URL mappings, write some tests using the built-in Django client.

We're almost there, but this doesn't work out perfectly. To do complete tests, we have to either …