Unit Testing

We like to use doctest in Python code. There are a number of standalone test scripts too.

def tested_func(a, b):
    """Multiplies two things.

    >>> tested_func(42, 3)
    126
    >>> tested_func("A", 4)
    'AAAA'
    """
    # Feel free to write tests before you write any code.

The doctests in lib/ and brushlib/ are run by Travis-CI whenever a new commit is made, because these are the tests which can run ‘headless’ (without a graphical user interface).

You can run the tests from the command line using the third-party nose tools.

$ sudo apt-get install python-nose
$ nosetests --with-doctest gui lib brushlib

Modules in gui/ are difficult to write automated tests for, due to their GTK dependency. Tests which rely on GTK objects may not run on a headless system, so they’re omitted from our Travis CI configuration. However, don’t let that stop you from writing tests for your GUI code. You can use doctest as above, or write your own test driver for a module’s widgets.