Test & Code

Latest Episodes:

16: Welcome to Test and Code Mar 31, 2016

Show notes

This is a small episode.

I'm changing the name from the "Python Test Podcast" to "Test & Code".
I just want to discuss the reasons behind this change, and take a peek at what's coming up in the future for this podcast.

Links

15: Lean Software Development Mar 09, 2016

Show notes

An introduction to Lean Software Development

This is a quick intro to the concepts of Lean Software Development.

I'm starting a journey of trying to figure out how to apply lean principles to software development in the context of 2016/2017.

Links

Lean Software Development book by Mary & Tom Poppendieck
wikipedia entry for Lean Software Development
Patreon supporters of the show
Talk Python to Me Podcast
Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps - video course
pytest sprint
pytest.org
pytest/tox indiegogo campaign

14: Continuous Integration with Travis CI – Josh Kalderimis Feb 25, 2016

Show notes

Interview with Josh Kalderimis from Travis CI.

Josh is a co-founder and Chief Post-It Officer at Travis CI.

Topics

What is Continuous Integration, CI
What is Travis CI
Some history of the company
travis-ci.org vs travis-ci.com and merging the two
Enterprise and the importance of security
Feature questions
- Travis vs Jenkins
- Travis notification through Slack
- Reporting history of Travis results
- Dealing with pytest results status other than pass/fail
- Capturing std out and stderr logging from tests
- Build artifacts
- Tox and Travis
- Using Selenium
What does a Chief Post-It Officer do
Differentiation between Travis and other CI options
Using Slack to keep remote teams communicating well
Travis team
Funding open source projects
Travis Foundation
Rails Girls Summer of Code
Open source grants
Mustaches and beards
Shite shirts
New Zealand
What does Team Periwinkle do

Links

13: Ian Cordasco – Betamax Feb 17, 2016

Show notes

Testing apps that use requests without using mock.

Interview with Ian Cordasco (@sigmavirus24)

Topics:

Betamax - python library for replaying requests interactions for use in testing.
requests
github3.py
Pycon 2015 talk: Ian Cordasco - Cutting Off the Internet: Testing Applications that Use Requests - PyCon 2015
Pytest and using Betamax with pytest fixtures
The utility (or uselessness) of teaching programming with Java (My own rant mainly)
Rackspace and Ian’s role at Rackspace and OpenStack
Python Code Quality Authority: flake8, pep8, mccabe, pylint, astroid, …
Static code analysis and what to use which tool when.
Raymond Hettinger - Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - PyCon 2015

Links:

Other Betamax resources:

12: Coverage.py with Ned Batchelder Feb 09, 2016

Show notes

In this episode I interview Ned Batchelder.

I know that coverage.py is very important to a lot of people to understand how much of their code is being covered by their test suites.
Since I'm far from an expert on coverage, I asked Ned to discuss it on the show.

I'm also quite a fan of Ned's 2014 PyCon talk "Getting Started Testing", so I definitely asked him about that.

We also discuss edX, Python user groups, PyCon talks, and more.

Some of what's covered (pun intended) in this episode:

coverage.py
- types of coverage
  - Line coverage
  - branch coverage
  - Behavior coverage
  - Data coverage
- How Ned became the owner of coverage.py
- Running tests from coverage.py vs running coverage from test runner.
edX
- what is it
- what Ned's role is
Ned's blog
Ned's PyCon 2014 talk "Getting Started Testing"
- Teaching testing and the difficulty of the classes being part of unittest
- fixtures package
- some of the difficulties of teaching unittest because of it's class based system.
- the history of classes in unittest coming from java's jUnit implementation
Boston's Python Group
PyCon in Portland
Ned to do a talk here "Machete mode debugging".
Practicing PyCon talks at local group meetings.
At the very least, practice it in front of a live audience.

Links:

Ned Batchelder
Coverage
Coverage documentation
django-nose
pytest-django
edX
open edX
Boston Python User Group
Portland Python User Group - I need to go to these
PyCon 2016 - Planning on attending, it's in Portland. Yay!
Getting Started Testing - Ned's 2014 Pycon talk

Special Guest: Ned Batchelder.

11: pytest assert magic Feb 04, 2016

Show notes

How pytest, unittest, and nose deal with assertions.

The job of the test framework to tell developers how and why their tests failed is a difficult job.
In this episode I talk about assert helper functions and the 3 methods pytest uses to get around having users need to use assert helper functions.

10: Test Case Design using Given-When-Then from BDD Jan 31, 2016

Show notes

Given-When-Then is borrowed from BDD and is my favorite structure for test case design.

It doesn’t matter if you are using pytest, unittest, nose, or something completely different, this episode will help you write better tests.

The Given-When-Then structure for test method/function development.
How and why to utilize fixtures for your given or precondition code.
Similarities with other structure discriptions.
- Setup-Test-Teardown
- Setup-Excercise-Verify-Teardown.
- Arrange-Act-Assert
- Preconditions-Trigger-Postconditions.
Benefits
- Communicate the purpose of your test more clearly
- Focus your thinking while writing the test
- Make test writing faster
- Make it easier to re-use parts of your test
- Highlight the assumptions you are making about the test preconditions
- Highlight what outcomes you are expecting and testing against.

Links discussed in the show:

9: Harry Percival : Testing Web Apps with Python, Selenium, Django Jan 18, 2016

Show notes

Intro to Harry Percival, his background and story of how he got into TDD and ended up writing a book
Comparing using unittest and pytest with applicability to testing django projects.
Functional end to end testing with selenium.
The django test client for middle level tests.
test isolation
django and isolated unit tests
unit tests vs integration tests
Testing done by the development team without an external QA
Double loop TDD: Functional test first, then unit tests
Spikes: investigations without tests
Harry's experience with having a freely available web version of a book that is also intended to be sold.

Update: Comment from Harry Percival on 19-Jan-2014
I might have been a bit down on unit tests vs functional tests in that "unit tests never fail comment".

Not true at all, particularly as we've just been thru upgrading django on our core system, and the unit tests really saved our bacon on that one...

Links

Test-Driven Development with Python
Obey the Testing Goat - Harry's site dedicated to the book and related posts.
Python Testing with unittest, nose, pytest
Gary Bernhardt's talk, Boundaries talk including a discussion of "Functional Core, Imperative Shell".
Video of Boundaries talk on youtube

8: Agile vs Agility : Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility) Dec 15, 2015

Show notes

In today's podcast, I dodge the question of "What do you think of Agile?" by reading an essay from Dave Thomas

7: The Waterfall Model and “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” Oct 21, 2015

Show notes

The waterfall model has been used and modified and changed and rebelled against since before I started programming. Waterfall such an important character in the story of software development that we should get to know it a better.

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