Course Data

Course name: Professional Testing with Python
Course length: 3 days
Remote: Yes
Open course: Yes
In-house: Yes
Course ID: PTE
Price: See registration link
German course here

Course Dates

Location Date Registration
Remote June 11 - 13, 2024
Leipzig March 04 - 06, 2025
Remote March 04 - 06, 2025

Language
English


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Professional Testing with Python

What Participants Say About This Course

I think overall the course was held excellently. I learnt a lot and learnt how to use the different techniques and ideas.

—Vinay Mathew, course participant

Great opportunity to learn directly from the author of py.test.

—a course participant

Impressive & abundant, clear information. It’s been a privilege!

—a course participant

Target Audience

People with a Python programming background, interested in best practices of testing Python libraries and applications. This course can be combined with introductory courses (see Recommended Module Combinations) to achieve appropriate Python skills.

Motivation

Testing is essential for code quality. Tests need to be automated and regularly run to benefit from them. Frameworks such as pytest are based on many years of exercise and help you apply best practices to your tests. Apart from integrating with existing unittest/nose test suites, pytest offers some unique features for writing and organizing your test code.

Testing and releasing your code for many different Python versions and implementations can be hard. The tox project is an effective tool to integrate testing and deployment. It works with and connects to established tools including those for Continuous Integration.

Applying the Python philosophy that simple things should be simple and complex tasks should be possible, pytest and tox make it easy to get started but at the same time provide powerful features for professional software development.

Course Content

In distinct steps we introduce terms and tools for testing in Python. Each step consists of an input, discussion and self-practice phase.

The main topics of the course are:

  • About testing: Why and how to write tests

  • About pytest: Why pytest, popularity, history overview

  • The basics: Fundamental pytest features, test discovery and plain asserts

  • Configuration: Typical directory structure, configs, options

  • Marks: Marking/grouping tests, skipping tests

  • Parametrization: Running tests against sets of input/output data

  • Fixtures: Providing test data, setting up objects, modularity

  • Built-in fixtures: Temporary files, patching, capturing output, test information

  • Fixtures advanced: Caching, cleanup/teardown, implicit fixtures, parametrizing

  • Migrating to pytest: Running existing testsuites, incremental rewriting, tooling

  • Mocking: Dealing with dependencies which are in our way, alternatives, monkeypatch and unittest.mock, mocking libraries and helpers

  • Plugin tour: Coverage, distributed testing, output improvements, alternative test syntax, testing C libraries, plugin overview

  • Property-based testing: Using hypothesis to generate test data

  • Writing plugins: Extending pytest via custom hooks, domain-specific languages

  • Open space: Discussions of your choice, postponed issues from the course

Optional

  • tox basics: Packaging, running tests against different Python versions

  • tox configuration: Defining environments

  • tox extra: Running tools via tox, integrating into Continuous Integration (CI)

Each bullet point will be covered with two to three short units with exercises.

Course Style

This is a hands-on course with lots of student activities. The presentation parts are usually short and include real-life examples. Students will create their own tests from the very beginning. Exercises are an important part of the training. Students are encouraged to bring their own problems to be discussed during the course.

Exercises

The participants can follow all steps directly on their computers. There are exercises at the end of each unit providing ample opportunity to apply the freshly learned knowledge.

Software

We use our online programing system that contains all needed software. There is no need to install any additional software. A modern internet browser and a decent internet connection will be enough.

Hardware for Open In-Person Trainings

For open trainings at our teaching center you can use your own laptop. Alternatively, we provide teaching computers. Please let us know if you need one in your registration form.

Course Material

Every participant receives comprehensive materials in PDF format that cover the whole course content as well as all source code.

How to contact us:
Python Academy GmbH & Co. KG
Zur Schule 20
04158 Leipzig / Germany
Tel:+49 341 260 3370
Fax:+49 341 520 4495
mail:info@python-academy.de
How to contact us:
Python Academy GmbH & Co. KG
Zur Schule 20
04158 Leipzig / Germany
Tel:+49 341 260 3370
Fax:+49 341 520 4495
mail:info@python-academy.de