Django testing tips [closed]

Question

In the spirit of this question, I would like to know if anyone has any tips on creating a useful and "complete" test suite (can a test suite ever be "complete"?) for a Django webapp.

My situation: I've knocked out a prototype and am now working on adding some regression testing. I personally use django-webtest for most of my tests with some URL testing using the Django test client.

II do not feel comfortable with my test suite at all. I am far from a testing pro so trying to improve on that end. Any tips---whether applicable in my situation or not---would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would recommend reading Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging by Karen M. Tracey. The first five chapters cover testing in Django. Specifically, you should look at Chapter 5 which discusses integrating other test tools. Below is an excerpt of what Chapter 5 covers:

In this chapter, we:

• Learned what hooks Django provides for adding test functions
• Saw an example of how these hooks can be used, specifically in the case of adding code coverage reporting
• Also explored an example where using these hooks was not necessary—when integrating the use of the twill test tool into our Django test cases

Here are links to some of the tools that Karen Tracey discusses in chapter 5 of her book:

• Ned Batchelder's coverage module
• Twill

Lettuce

You may also want to check out Lettuce. From the website:

Lettuce is a very simple BDD tool based on the Cucumber.

The Lettuce documentation also has a section on integrating Lettuce with Django.

Answer 2

Testing provides the answers to (at least ) 4 questions.

1. Is my implementation correct? Does the app match the documented or at least mental image of how it is supposed to behave.

2. Did my latest change break anything?

3. Is my app secure? From both innocent users and devious people.

4. Is my app's performance sufficient?

For #1, there needs to be at least one test per "feature" and probably many for major features. It is very easy to make errors of omission here if you are both the developer and the test developer.

For #2 starting out with the discipline of writing the test suites along with the code (and faithfully running it) is key.

For #3, Make sure that URLs accessed outside of normal program directing operations behave properly with respect to permissions. You probably don't want one user to be able to modify or even another user' info but if they can just type in ../user/505 and get to everything there that's probably a problem. I'm sure there is a lot of other things that should be tested here, so other people chime in here please.

Testing performance and scaling robustness for an app with a tremendous amount of traffic isn't something I know much about.

Looking at the test cases for Django itself provide a sense of the granularity of what should be tested.Django trunk tests

Django docs have a good article on testing: search the docs for testing.