Using other tools with unittest?

[John Roth]

"Edward K. Ream" <edreamleo at charter.net> wrote in message
news:vrl68dm423oqb9 at corp.supernews.com...
> Has anyone used tools like pychecker (or even Python's own debugger or
> profiler) during unit testing?  Here are some things that might be natural
> to do:
>
> 1. pychecker can run all kinds of fancy tests on code.  I'm wondering
> whether these tests could be incorporated somehow into individual unit
> tests.  For example, one might use pychecker to assert that a subclass
does,
> or does not, override a method of a base class.  Yes, one could write that
> test "by hand".  The question is: how good is pychecker for this sort of
> thing?  Anyone have any experience?

I don't have any experiance, but the statement on the project page
http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/
doesn't suggest that it can do what you mention. It's more a static
analyzer for common problems.

That said, it might be a good project practice that all code needs to
pass pychecker before it can be committed.

Also, I'd like to know how you write that kind of test 'by hand.'
I can certainly see checking a single class for a manditory override /
not override, but I can't see exactly how you'd check *all* subclasses
for that condition without building a lot of infrastructure. You would at
least have to *find* all the class definitions.

> 2. Python's debugger is simple because Python so helpfully provides the
> sys.settrace function.  Has anyone used sys.settrace for unit testing?
For
> example, suppose you wanted to make a list of the methods that are
exercised
> by a test suite.  The tracing function registered by sys.settrace could
> easily do this.  Etc.

There are at least two coverage tools that use the trace hook, and
I suspect there are others. One is accessable through the Vaults;
I don't know the rest of them. I've frequently thought that if you're
using XP or TDD, it might be a real good practice to run a coverage
checker. TDD is supposed to get you very close to 100% statement
coverage without extra effort.

When I want to check, I simply run my test suite under the coverage
tool. It takes about three times (or more) to run that way.

> 3 In a slightly different direction, has someone used a simulation of
> aspect-oriented programming in Python to make statements about test
> coverage, or for other testing purposes?

I don't understand this one at all...

John Roth

>
> Thanks.
>
> Edward
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> Edward K. Ream   email:  edreamleo at charter.net
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