Simon Willison’s Weblog

Test-Driven Heresy. Tim Bray advocates TDD for maintenance development, but argues that it may not be as useful during the exploratory, greenfield development phase of a project. # 24th June 2009, 11:03 am

Testing Django Views for Concurrency Issues. Neat decorator for executing a Django view under high concurrency in your unit tests, to help spot errors caused by database race conditions that should be executed inside a transaction. # 27th May 2009, 10:01 am

Nose 0.11 released. My favourite Python testing tool just got some really neat new features, including the ability to parallelize tests across multiple processes (hence CPUs) using the multiprocess module, Xunit XML output for integration with continuous integration tools and a --failed switch to re-run only the last batch of failed tests. # 8th May 2009, 11:24 am

Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps. A classic case of a number in a title making the article look less interesting than it actually is. Lots of interesting information here from IMVU’s Eric Ries. # 1st April 2009, 12:25 am

Changeset 9793: SMTP testing documentation. I didn’t know this trick: running “python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025” will start up a simple SMTP server which dumps received e-mails to the terminal instead of forwarding them on. # 29th January 2009, 1:35 pm

Django now has fast tests. Changeset 9756 switched Django’s TestCase class to running tests inside a transaction and rolling back at the end (instead of doing a full dump and reload). “Ellington’s test suite, which was taking around 1.5-2 hours to run on Postgres, has been reduced to 10 minutes.” # 16th January 2009, 11:40 am

Localbuilder. Gareth Rushgrove’s neat little Python continuous integration tool—it watches a directory for changes, then runs a command when it spots any. # 14th January 2009, 10:57 pm

Django snippets: RequestFactory. I’ve been wanting this for ages; when I finally got around to writing it it turned out to only be a dozen or so lines of code. Makes it easy to create mock request objects in Django, which you can then use for testing view functions directly (bypassing the current test client mechanism which requires views to be assigned to a URLconf before they can be tested). # 12th August 2008, 12:40 pm

ratproxy. “A semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool”—watches you browse and highlights potential XSS, CSRF and other vulnerabilities in your application. Created by Michal Zalewski at Google. # 3rd July 2008, 2:35 pm

QUnit. The jQuery unit testing framework is now documented and supported as a separate project. # 26th May 2008, 5:31 pm

Python one-liner of the day. I love the idea of publishing one-liners accompanied by one-line test suites. # 26th April 2008, 10:24 am

xPyUnit: Uniting in Python with XML reporting. Should be just the ticket for integrating Django’s testing framework with Cruise Control. # 27th March 2008, 12:35 pm

Mock—Mocking and Test Utilities (via) New mocking library for Python based on the “action ... assertion” pattern (as opposed to the more common “record ... replay”). # 20th November 2007, 11:30 pm

Using the jQuery test suite for your own projects. jQuery’s test suite has clever start(), stop() and expect() methods for running assertions within asynchronous code. # 12th October 2007, 12:56 pm

nose 0.10.0 final! Nose is my favourite Python testing tool: it can auto-discover and execute tests in a directory hierarchy, which makes it easy to run just a sub-set of your test suite. # 11th October 2007, 1:52 pm

YUI 2.3.0. New components are a rich text editor, dojo-style package loader, lazy ImageLoader, colour picker and unit test framework. Easier skinning as well. # 1st August 2007, 8:20 am

Test stubbing httplib2. Nice demonstration of monkey-patching as part of unit testing in Python. # 10th May 2007, 11:24 pm

The joy of pdb.set_trace(). I use nosetests --pdb-failures as my main entrypoint for Python debugging—it starts the debugger at the first failing test. # 25th April 2007, 11:37 pm

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image (via) Microsoft have made free VPC images of IE 6 and IE 7 available for testing, but they expire in August. # 20th April 2007, 4:47 pm