Test-Driven Development with Python, 3rd Edition

Part IV. More Advanced Topics in Testing

“Oh my gosh, what? Another section? Harry, I’m exhausted. It’s already been four hundred pages; I don’t think I can handle a whole nother section of the book. Particularly not if it’s called ‘Advanced’…​maybe I can get away with just skipping it?”

Oh no, you can’t! This may be called the “advanced” section, but it’s full of really important topics for test-driven development (TDD) and web development. No way can you skip it. If anything, it’s even more important than the first two sections.

First off, we’ll get into that sine qua non of web development: JavaScript. Seeing how TDD works in another language can give you a whole new perspective.

We’ll be talking about a key technique, “spiking”, which is where you relax the strict rules of TDD and allow yourself a bit of exploratory hacking.

Tip

A common objection to TDD is “how can I write tests if I don’t even know what I’m doing?” Spiking is the bit where you get to play around and figure things out, so you can come back and do it test-first later.

We’ll be talking about how to integrate third-party systems, and how to test them. We’ll cover mocking, which is hard to avoid in the world of Python testing.¹

We’ll talk about test fixtures and server-side debugging, and how to set up a continuous integration (CI) environment. None of these things are take-it-or-leave-it, optional, luxury extras for your project—​they’re all vital!

Inevitably, the learning curve does get a little steeper in ...