How to start TDD in Django?

Question

I'm new both to Django and unit testing but since I'm starting a project after a fair amount of time playing with the framework I decided to give unit testing a shot.

My enthusiasm aside, I am pretty lost as to how to plan the developing process. I did a little search in github for Django projects that use unit testing and I stumbled upon this. I see there are only tests on the "tagging" app, and it looks good but I have no idea how to break it down. Why the "models.py" file in the apps/tagging/tests/? The model classes there have nothing to do with the ones in apps/tagging/models.py ...

Any ideas on how to figure this out or find a good example on how to implement unit testing into a django environment ?

Also, I read in the docs that Django introduced unittest2 in 1.3 so would "Django 1.1 Testing And Debugging - by Karen M. Tracey" be a helpful reading or do you think it could cause some confusion?

Anyways, I appreciate any input in advance.

Answer 1

If I may plug my own tutorial, it covers how to do TDD in Django from the ground up. I cover the same steps as the "official" Django tutorial, except using TDD every step of the way. That includes full browser-automation testing with Selenium (which allows you to test behaviour from the end-user's point of view, including the possibility of including javascript later). I also show how to use the Django TestClient for unit testing...

http://tdd-django-tutorial.com

Answer 2

Django does a great job of getting you started. They outline what should and shouldn't be tested, and how to use some of their built in test classes. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/

In addition i'd recommend django-nose test runner. It has a lot of great plugins.

I think general convention is to have a tests.py file in each app.

I personally will write at least 1 test for each function that I create. More depending on how complicated logic is. As the app develops these tests develop into regression tests for my project.