Best strategy for testing class and subclasses in pytest?

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

> From: "C.D. Reimer" <chris at cdreimer.com>
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm writing a chess engine to learn about Python classes and
> inheritance, and using pytest for the unit test. 
[snip]
> I tried to create a separate class and/or module to import the common
> tests for each class and subclass. My attempts often ended in failure
> with the "RuntimeError: super(): no arguments" message. I couldn't
> find
> a working example on the Internet on how to do that. The pytest
> documentation is all over the place.
> 
> Is there a way to reuse tests in pytest?
> 
> Or should I test everything in the class and test only the
> implemented
> functionality in the subclasses?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Chris R.

I've played a little bit with pytest, I was interested in trying since it claims to add less boilerplate than unittest.
I've created 2 classes, Piece and Queen, both have the 'isPiece' and 'name' property (for the sake of demo).

If you execute the code (python 2.7) with pytest, you'll see that the TestQueen class actually execute 2 tests, one inherited from its base test class TestPiece.
So in the end, I'd say that you may put all common tests in TestPiece, and each specific implementation into TestQueen.


import pytest

class Piece(object):
	@property
	def isPiece(self): #for the sake of demo
		return True
	@property
	def name(self):
		raise NotImplementedError # Piece is a sort of abstract class

class Queen(Piece):
	@property
	def name(self):
		return 'Queen'

class TestPiece(object):
	cls = Piece
	def test_isPiece(self):
		assert self.cls().isPiece
	def test_name(self):
		with pytest.raises(NotImplementedError):
			assert self.cls().name

class TestQueen(TestPiece):
	cls = Queen
	def test_name(self):
		assert self.cls().name == 'Queen'


py.test test.py
platform linux2 -- Python 2.7.3 -- py-1.4.20 -- pytest-2.5.2
4 passed in 0.01 seconds


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