Test & Code

Latest Episodes:

110: Testing Django - from unittest to pytest - Adam Parkin Apr 25, 2020

Show notes

Django supports testing out of the box with some cool extensions to unittest. However, many people are using pytest for their Django testing, mostly using the pytest-django plugin.

Adam Parkin, who is known online as CodependentCodr, joins us to talk about migrating an existing Django project from unittest to pytest. Adam tells us just how easy this is.

Special Guest: Adam Parkin.

Links:

109: Testing in Financial Services - Eric Bergemann Apr 14, 2020

Show notes

Financial services have their own unique testing development challenges. But they also have lots of the same challenges as many other software projects.

Eric Bergemann joins Brian Okken to discuss:

Specific testing challenges in the financial services domain
CI/CD : Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment
TDD : Test Driven Development
Confidence from testable applications
Testing strategies to add coverage to legacy systems
Testing the data and test cases themselves
DevOps
Continuous testing
Manual testing procedures
BDD & Gherkin
Hiring in vs training industry knowledge

Special Guest: Eric Bergemann.

Links:

108: PySpark - Jonathan Rioux Apr 09, 2020

Show notes

Apache Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.
PySpark blends the powerful Spark big data processing engine with the Python programming language to provide a data analysis platform that can scale up for nearly any task.

Johnathan Rioux, author of "PySpark in Action", joins the show and gives us a great introduction of Spark and PySpark to help us decide how to get started and decide whether or not to decide if Spark and PySpark are right you.

Special Guest: Jonathan Rioux.

Links:

107: Property Based Testing in Python with Hypothesis - Alexander Hultnér Mar 27, 2020

Show notes

Hypothesis is the Python tool used for property based testing.
Hypothesis claims to combine "human understanding of your problem domain with machine intelligence to improve the quality of your testing process while spending less time writing tests."

In this episode Alexander Hultnér introduces us to property based testing in Python with Hypothesis.

Some topics covered:

What is property based testing
Thinking differently for property based testing
Using hypothesis / property based testing in conjunction with normal testing
Failures saved and re-run
What parts of development/testing is best suited for hypothesis / property based testing
Comparing function implementations
Testing against REST APIs that use Open API / Swagger with schemathesis
Changing the number of tests in different test environments
System, integration, end to end, and unit tests

Special Guest: Alexander Hultnér.

Links:

106: Visual Testing : How IDEs can make software testing easier - Paul Everitt Mar 20, 2020

Show notes

IDEs can help people with automated testing.

In this episode, Paul Everitt and Brian discuss ways IDEs can encourage testing and make it easier for everyone, including beginners. We discuss features that exist and are great, as well as what is missing.

The conversation also includes topics around being welcoming to new contributors for both open source and professional projects.

We talk about a lot of topics, and it's a lot of fun. But it's also important. Because IDEs can make testing

Some topics discussed:

Making testing more accessible
Test First vs teaching testing last
TDD workflow
Autorun
Rerunning last failures
Different ways to run different levels of tests
Command line flags and how to access them in IDEs
pytest.ini
zooming in and out of test levels
running parametrizations
running tests with coverage and profiling
parametrize vs parameterize
parametrization identifiers
pytest fixture support
global configurations / configuration templates
coverage and testing and being inviting to new contributors
confidence in changes and confidence in contributions
navigating code, tests, fixtures
grouping tests in modules, classes, directories
BDD, behavior driven development, cucumber, pytest-bdd
web development testing
parallel testing with xdist and IDE support
refactor rename

Special Guest: Paul Everitt.

Links:

Python Testing with pytest — The pytest book
PyCharm
PyCharm pro
episode 54: Python 1994 - Paul Everitt
pytest-xdist

105: TAP: Test Anything Protocol - Matt Layman Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

The Test Anything Protocol, or TAP, is a way to record test results in a language agnostic way, predates XML by about 10 years, and is still alive and kicking.

Matt Layman has contributed to Python in many ways, including his educational newsletter, and his Django podcast, Django Riffs.

Matt is also the maintainer of tap.py and pytest-tap, two tools that bring the Test Anything Protocol to Python.

In this episode, Matt and I discuss TAP, it's history, his involvement, and some cool use cases for it.

Special Guest: Matt Layman.

Links:

104: Top 28 pytest plugins - Anthony Sottile Mar 04, 2020

Show notes

pytest is awesome by itself. pytest + plugins is even better.
In this episode, Anthony Sottile and Brian Okken discuss the top 28 pytest plugins.

Some of the plugins discussed (we also mention a few plugins related to some on this list):

pytest-cov
pytest-timeout
pytest-xdist
pytest-mock
pytest-runner
pytest-instafail
pytest-django
pytest-html
pytest-metadata
pytest-asyncio
pytest-split-tests
pytest-sugar
pytest-rerunfailures
pytest-env
pytest-cache
pytest-flask
pytest-benchmark
pytest-ordering
pytest-watch
pytest-pythonpath
pytest-flake8
pytest-pep8
pytest-repeat
pytest-pylint
pytest-randomly
pytest-selenium
pytest-mypy
pytest-freezegun

Honorable mention:

pytest-black
pytest-emoji
pytest-poo

Special Guest: Anthony Sottile.

Links:

103: Django - Lacey Williams Henschel Feb 29, 2020

Show notes

Django is without a doubt one of the most used web frameworks for Python. Lacey Williams Henschel is a Django consultant and has joined me to talk about Django, the Django community, and so much more.

Topics:

Django
The Django Community
Django Girls
Django Girls Tutorial
DjangoCon
Software Testing
Using tests during learning
pytest-django
testing Django
Wagtail

Special Guest: Lacey Williams Henschel.

Links:

102: Cosmic Python, TDD, testing and external dependencies - Harry Percival Feb 27, 2020

Show notes

Harry Percival has completed his second book, "Architecture Patterns with Python".
So of course we talk about the book, also known as "Cosmic Python".
We also discuss lots of testing topics, especially related to larger systems and systems involving third party interfaces and APIs.

Topics

Harry's new book, "Architecture Patterns with Python". a.k.a. Cosmic Python
TDD : Test Driven Development
Test Pyramid
Tradeoffs of different architectural choices
Mocks and their pitfalls
Avoiding mocks
Separating conceptual business logic
Dependency injection
Dependency inversion
Identifying external dependencies
Interface adapters to mimize the exposed surface area of external dependencies
London School vs Classic/Detroit School of TDD
Testing strategies for testing external REST APIs

Links:

101: Application Security - Anthony Shaw Feb 19, 2020

Show notes

Application security is best designed into a system from the start.
Anthony Shaw is doing something about it by creating an editor plugin that actually helps you write more secure application code while you are coding.

On today's Test & Code, Anthony and I discuss his security plugin, but also application security in general, as well as other security components you need to consider.

Security is something every team needs to think about, whether you are a single person team, a small startup, or a large corporation.

Anthony and I also discuss where to start if it's just a few of you, or even just one of you.

Topics include: