Art of Unit Testing

[John Roth]

""Björn Lindström"" <bkhl at stp.lingfil.uu.se> wrote in message 
news:87mzo0s25q.fsf at lucien.dreaming...
> Christoph Zwerschke <zwerschke at zuv.uni-heidelberg.de> writes:
>
>> Would it make sense to add "globaleSetup" and "globalTearDown" methods
>> to the TestCase class? I think at least it would not harm
>> anybody. Where should such proposals be submitted?
>
> In general that's not such a good idea. If you build your tests like
> that, it gets hard to know which test really went wrong, and you might
> get the situation where the whole set of tests works, but depend on each
> other in some way. (This can also happen for more obscure reasons, and
> is worth looking out for whichever way you do it.)
>
> So, rebuilding the environment for the each before every single test is
> generally worth the overhead.

Generally is not always. There are configuration issues that are
best dealt with once at the beginning of the test, and once at
the end, and that have absolutely nothing to do with the order
in which each elementary test runs.

When your customers keep asking for something, and you
keep telling them that they really don't want what they're
asking for, who's lisening, and who's being stubborn?

John Roth
Python Fit.

>
> -- 
> Björn Lindström <bkhl at stp.lingfil.uu.se>
> Student of computational linguistics, Uppsala University, Sweden