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The Python unit testing framework, sometimes referred to as ``PyUnit,'' is
a Python language version of JUnit, by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma.
JUnit is, in turn, a Java version of Kent's Smalltalk testing
framework. Each is the de facto standard unit testing framework for
its respective language.
unittest supports test automation, sharing of setup and shutdown
code for tests, aggregation of tests into collections, and independence of
the tests from the reporting framework. The unittest module
provides classes that make it easy to support these qualities for a
set of tests.
To achieve this, unittest supports some important concepts:
- test fixture
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A test fixture represents the preparation needed to perform one
or more tests, and any associate cleanup actions. This may involve,
for example, creating temporary or proxy databases, directories, or
starting a server process.
- test case
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A test case is the smallest unit of testing. It checks for a
specific response to a particular set of inputs. unittest
provides a base class, TestCase, which may be used to create
new test cases.
- test suite
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A test suite is a collection of test cases, test suites, or
both. It is used to aggregate tests that should be executed
together.
- test runner
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A test runner is a component which orchestrates the execution of
tests and provides the outcome to the user. The runner may use a
graphical interface, a textual interface, or return a special value to
indicate the results of executing the tests.
The test case and test fixture concepts are supported through the
TestCase and FunctionTestCase classes; the former
should be used when creating new tests, and the latter can be used when
integrating existing test code with a unittest-driven framework.
When building test fixtures using TestCase, the setUp()
and tearDown() methods can be overridden to provide
initialization and cleanup for the fixture. With
FunctionTestCase, existing functions can be passed to the
constructor for these purposes. When the test is run, the
fixture initialization is run first; if it succeeds, the cleanup
method is run after the test has been executed, regardless of the
outcome of the test. Each instance of the TestCase will only
be used to run a single test method, so a new fixture is created for
each test.
Test suites are implemented by the TestSuite class. This
class allows individual tests and test suites to be aggregated; when
the suite is executed, all tests added directly to the suite and in
``child'' test suites are run.
A test runner is an object that provides a single method,
run(), which accepts a TestCase or TestSuite
object as a parameter, and returns a result object. The class
TestResult is provided for use as the result object.
unittest provides the TextTestRunner as an example
test runner which reports test results on the standard error stream by
default. Alternate runners can be implemented for other environments
(such as graphical environments) without any need to derive from a
specific class.
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