Advices from Simon Willison (2020-02-11)

See also

• 2020-02-11 How to cheat at unit tests with pytest and Black by Simon Willison, @simonw

• https://simonwillison.net/2020/Feb/11/cheating-at-unit-tests-pytest-black/

• https://simonwillison.net/2018/Jul/28/documentation-unit-tests/

• https://fediverse.org/simonw

• https://github.com/simonw

• https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasettecloud/

• https://github.com/simonw/datasette

• https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ecosystem.html#ecosystem

Extract

I’ve used this technique to write many of the tests in both Datasette and sqlite-utils , and those are by far the best tested pieces of software I’ve ever released .

I started doing this around two years ago, and I’ve held off writing about it until I was confident I understood the downsides.

I haven’t found any yet: I end up with a robust, comprehensive test suite and it takes me less than half the time to write the tests than if I’d been hand-crafting all of those comparisons from scratch.