17th March 2021
When you have to mock a collaborator, avoid using the Mock object directly. Either use mock.create_autospec() or mock.patch(autospec=True) if at all possible. Autospeccing from the real collaborator means that if the collaborator's interface changes, your tests will fail. Manually speccing or not speccing at all means that changes in the collaborator's interface will not break your tests that use the collaborator: you could have 100% test coverage and your library would fall over when used!
Recent articles
- Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark - 16th July 2026
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026