Abstract

Any team developing and maintaining software - be it free and open source or commercial - employs one form of software testing or another. But what are the different kinds of tests in our tool boxes? And how are they best used? In this talk we’ll take a look around and try to answer these questions.

First, we’ll examine the basic concepts of testing: Everyone has probably at least heard about unit tests, but are they all you need? Performance tests can help you find out how well your product performs under load and detect bottle necks early on. Manual testing is often looked down upon, since it’s not automated, but is it always a bad idea? And what even is mutation testing?

We’ll also get to know a lot of the amazing testing tools from the Python ecosystem. Find out what the best test runner is (Spoiler alert: it’s pytest). Learn how to make writing test more fun and less work using tools like mock, Faker and factory_boy. Measure the quality of your test suite using coverage.py.

But no tool is the right one for any situation. We’ll also talk about when and how to use each of the tools, while debunking common misconceptions and demonstrating best practices.