Clean Code in Python

Defining the boundaries of what to test

Testing requires effort. And if we are not careful when deciding what to test, we will never end testing, hence wasting a lot of effort without achieving much.

We should scope the testing to the boundaries of our code. If we don't, we would have to also test the dependencies (external/third-party libraries or modules) or our code, and then their respective dependencies, and so on and so forth in a never-ending journey. It's not our responsibility to test dependencies, so we can assume that these projects have tests of their own. It would be enough just to test that the correct calls to external dependencies are done with the correct parameters (and that might even be an acceptable use of patching), ...