Exhaustive Unit Testing

[Emanuele D'Arrigo]

Hi everybody,

another question on unit testing, admittedly not necessarily a python-
specific one...

I have a class method about 60 lines long (*) and due to some 9 non-
trivial IFs statements (3 and 2 of which nested) the number of
possible paths the program flow can take is uncomfortably large, each
path characterized by an uncomfortably long list of careful turns to
take. Given that all paths have large portions of them overlapping
with each other, is there a strategy that would allow me to collapse
the many cases into only a few representative ones?

I can sense that exhaustively testing all paths is probably overkill.
On the other hand just going through all nodes and edges between the
nodes -at least once- is probably not enough. Is there any technique
to find the right(ish) middle?

Thanks for your help!

Manu

(*) for the 50/500 purists: it's my only method/function with more
than 50 lines so far... and it include comments!