Test-Driven Development with Python, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Improving Functional Tests: Ensuring Isolation and Removing Voodoo Sleeps

Before we dive in and fix our real problem, let’s take care of a couple of housekeeping items. At the end of the last chapter, we made a note that different test runs were interfering with each other, so we’ll fix that. I’m also not happy with all these time.sleeps peppered through the code; they seem a bit unscientific, so we’ll replace them with something more reliable.

SCRATCHPAD:

• Clean up after FT runs

• Remove time.sleeps

Both of these changes will be moving towards testing “best practices”, making our tests more deterministic and more reliable.

Ensuring Test Isolation in Functional Tests

We ended the last chapter with a classic testing problem: how to ensure isolation between tests. Each run of our functional tests was leaving list items lying around in the database, and that would interfere with the test results when you next ran the tests.

When we run unit tests, the Django test runner automatically creates a brand new test database (separate from the real one), which it can safely reset before each individual test is run, and then throw away at the end. But our functional tests currently run against the “real” database, db.sqlite3.

One way to tackle this would be to “roll our own” solution, and add some code to functional_tests.py which would do the cleaning up. The setUp and tearDown methods are perfect for this sort of thing.

Since Django 1.4 though, there’s a new class called ...