Exhaustive Unit Testing

[James Harris]

On 27 Nov, 16:32, "Emanuele D'Arrigo" <man... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 27, 5:00 am, Steven D'Aprano
>
> <ste... at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> > Refactor until your code is simple enough to unit-test effectively, then
> > unit-test effectively.
>
> Ok, I've taken this wise suggestion on board and of course I found
> immediately ways to improve the method. -However- this generates
> another issue. I can fragment the code of the original method into one
> public method and a few private support methods. But this doesn't
> reduce the complexity of the testing because the number and complexity
> of the possible path stays more or less the same. The solution to this
> would be to test the individual methods separately, but is the only
> way to test private methods in python to make them (temporarily) non
> private? I guess ultimately this would only require the removal of the
> appropriate double-underscores followed by method testing and then
> adding the double-underscores back in place. There is no "cleaner"
> way, is there?

Difficult to say without seeing the code. You could post it, perhaps.
On the other hand a general recommendation from Programming Pearls
(Jon Bentley) is to convert code to data structures. Maybe you could
convert some of the code to decision tables or similar.

James