Quick Testing

A small confession: when writing code, I don’t usually write tests first. There, I’ve said it. Hate me. I suspect I’m not alone among Python developers. Yes, yes, testing is important, and for my major projects, tests still get written. However, for a lot of small things like little scripts, utilities, and personal projects, I just don’t bother because I don’t want to think about all of the extra steps and tooling that’s usually involved. However, a recent conference experience may have changed some of my views. In this installment, I discuss a more lightweight approach to testing along with a brief introduction to some third-party testing libraries, including pytest and Hypothesis.