How to organize test cases with PyUnit

[Roy Smith]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> Is it really important the order the tests are run in? 

I'm not sure, but it certainly *feels* like it should be important ;-)

Well, here's an example.  I've got a parser which returns a dictionary 
of dictionaries.  My setUp() method put this in self.tables, then I've 
got:

    def test101 (self):
        'parse() returns a dictionary'
        self.assertEqual (type (self.tables), DictType)

    def test102 (self):
        'parse() returns a dictionary of dictionaries'
        for table in self.tables.values():
            self.assertEqual (type (table), DictType)

I guess the tests could be run in either order, but it seems better to 
do the top-level test first because that mimics how I think about the 
problem.  If you were to come to me and say, "I've got this complicated 
data structure which I think may be corrupted, can you help me figure 
out what i did wrong?", I'd probably start at the top and work my way 
down.

>From the point of view of "it's done when it passes all the tests", then 
yes, I agree with you that the order doesn't matter.  But as a 
diagnostic tool, it seems like order might be important.