I'm writing a software application of a few thousand lines of code (in Python), and in order to keep the whole thing together, slowly but certainly the need for unit tests (and later, other types of tests...) has arisen.
My problem is how to organize the many testing functions that I've written so far: Suppose I have a function myfunc
for which I want to write tests. What I have are functions like so:
test1pos_myfunc():
#...
test2pos_myfunc():
#...
test3pos_myfunc():
#...
#and so on...
that each test whether one input if myfunc
delivers the correct output. Then I also have another suite of functions where I test where the correct exceptions get thrown if I give bad input to myfunc
; these are
test1neg_myfunc():
#...
test2neg_myfunc():
#...
test3neg_myfunc():
#...
#and so on...
This setup seems less than ideal, in particular for "negative" tests, because often I group together those functions that test whether the same exception gets thrown - e.g. test1neg_myfunc
, test2neg_myfunc
and test3neg_myfunc
might all test if the same exception MyError
gets thrown for different inputs and test4neg_myfunc
and test5neg_myfunc
might test if the same MyHorribbleError
gets thrown.
Now if I want to add one more testing function to test ´MyError` I have to renumber all the other functions. What would be a better way to organize this?
Here are some solutions I thought of, but none satisfy me:
use the name of the exception in the function name and restart numbering for every test of a new exception (seems like a bad idea, because it will reduce readability), e.g.
test1MyError_myfunc
,test2MyError_myfunc
and so on.take all tests of one exception and lump them as methods in a class; and then also lump all tests belonging to one function in a class (this is better my test names will become shorter and - but then again it feels bad, because I'm importing a concept from OOP into a setting where I'm programming strictly procedurally! And using a class just to lump together some functions seems overkill; doesn't Python offer anything better as a container to store other things?)
outsource all the tests, similar to the organization in classes, in different modules (everything I wrote about classes applies, but with the huge disadvantage that I will have a ton of files then laying around)
Can anybody come up with something better? What are industry standards here? (I'm a novice programmer.)