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Python Testing

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What Is Testing?

1:54 with Kenneth Love

When we're talking about testing, what are we talking about? What's a unit test? Heck, what's a *unit*? Let's talk about a couple of these concepts and exactly what we're going to cover in this course.

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    Spend any time learning about programming, and 0:04
    you're gonna come across the acronym TDD, which stands for Test Driven Development. 0:06
    In TDD, once you know what you're going to build, you write the test for 0:11
    it before you write the code. 0:14
    For some people, this works. 0:17
    For others, it doesn't. 0:18
    Don't feel bad if TDD doesn't make sense to you right now. 0:20
    What's important is that you write tests, not whether you write the test before you 0:22
    write the code, or whether you write tests for code that you've already written. 0:26
    So what is a test? 0:30
    In this course, when I talk about tests, I'm really talking about unit tests. 0:31
    Well that brings up another question, huh? 0:35
    What the heck is a unit? 0:37
    A unit is a single feature or aspect of your code. 0:39
    Say you have a class that represents a car. 0:43
    It has a make, a model and a year. 0:44
    It also has attributes like top speed and fuel capacity and maybe it has methods 0:47
    that let you start and stop the car's engine or drive the car. 0:51
    Each of those things, each attribute and each method, would be a unit and 0:55
    each would need at least one test for it. 0:59
    Since these tests correspond to a unit of code, we call them unit tests. 1:01
    For example, our car might have a top speed attribute which 1:06
    should always be set to a number. 1:08
    We can write a test that sets it to a string like really fast, and 1:10
    make sure our code raises an exception when that happens. 1:14
    There are other types of tests too. 1:17
    Regression tests make sure that previous mistakes don't happen again and 1:19
    integration tests run your code through a battery of uses to make sure that 1:22
    a certain process, one that uses multiple units, works from beginning to end. 1:26
    For example, if you wanted to test the registration flow of a Flask app, 1:30
    you'd have a test that loads the account creation page, fills out and 1:34
    submits the form, follows the redirect, and 1:36
    checks that the user model was created, and that you ended up on the sign in page. 1:38
    We're gonna focus on unit tests in this course, but 1:43
    you can use the tools we talk about to write all three kinds of tests. 1:45
    Okay. Now that we know what a test is, 1:48
    let's go look at how to write the simplest type of test, a dock test. 1:50

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