Django Day Copenhagen 2023

• Talk: A minimal Django Testing Styleguide
• Event: Djanjo Day Copenhagen 2023, October 6th 2023
• Organiser: Django Danmark
• Where: Union, Nørrebro, Copenhagen
• Github repo: @jvzammit/cph23

Talk video

Talk description

Original submission:

A lot of material is out there to ensure that “style” is maintained for “non test” code.

But what is “style”? And why do we need a “style” guide? And why would we need a style guide for our tests code?

Explain to me with examples please.

When reading and doing further work on the talk, I realised there is no definitive styleguide.

The most suitable styleguide depends on the project, the team and the organisation as a whole. And it’s not something cast in stone.

The talk does not define a styleguide itself. But rather goes through:

• What to test
• How we think about tests, and
• How we should write them as a result
  • This includes aspects of writing tests the team should agree on

Key takeaways:

• Agree on what to test — this affects how to write tests
• Code is read far more than it is written, so write tests you want to read

Slides

References

Github Repo

From which code samples were taken: https://github.com/jvzammit/cph23

Books

• Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach. European Adaptation. Fifth Edition. Roger S. Pressman. 2000.
• Software Engineering at Google. Curated by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck & Hyrum Wright. O’Reilly. 2020. Read online at abseil.io
• Two Scoops of Django 1.5. Daniel Greenfeld and Audrey Roy. Today Daniel and Audrey Roy Greenfeld. feldroy.com
• Speed Up Your Django Tests. Adam Johnson. adamj.eu

Articles

• A minimal Django testing style guide. Original post on which I decided to dig deeper for this talk.
• TestPyramid by Martin Fowler.
• The wrong abstraction by Sandi Metz.
• Just Say No to More End-to-End Tests. Mike Wacker - Google Testing Blog.
• Why and how I get 100% test coverage for my Django projects, and you should too. Sasha Romjin.
• Given-When-Then - Martin Fowler.
• Arrange-Assert-Act - Bill Wake.

Docs and Packages

• unittest module - Python’s standard library.
• Testing in Django - Django docs.
• Radon package’s Introduction to Code Metrics.
• time-machine and freezegun, and comparison by time-machine’s author.
• Conventions for test discovery - pytest.

Example style guides

• Python Testing Style Guide - Octopus Energy.
• My Python testing style guide - Thea “Stargirl” Flowers.

Tweets

• The Testing Trophy by @kentcdodds
• Testing on the Toilet - Don’t Put Logic in Tests by @deliberatecoder

Other

• Discussion about usage of cyclomatic complexity metric in Python projects - StackOverflow.com