Effective PyCharm (2021 edition) Transcripts
Chapter: Unit testing
Lecture: Why software testing?
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Let's set the stage with just a couple of thoughts about testing,
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software testing, unit testing integration tests and all those sorts of things.
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The first thought is a quote from Steve C. McConnell,
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he's the author of code complete.
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And he says the problem with quick and dirty is that the dirty remains long after
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the quick has been forgotten. Most software lives for a long time.
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And if it is built poorly it is unreliable.
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If you have no way to change it and verify that it's still working,
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you're going to end up in a bad place as that software grows.
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The next one is anonymous but similar.
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The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been
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forgotten. So it's really important for us to test our software.
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Sure. We might write little programs that are just utilities and just knock something out
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real quick and have no test at all.
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That's totally fine. But if you're working on a team building professional software that's going
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to live for a long time,
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it's really important that it has test and that you can verify it.
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Still working Another aspect that often is forgotten around testing and dynamic languages like python is
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we need something to exercise the code to even verify that it's right.
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A continuous integration. What does it mean to build python anyway,
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doesn't mean very much so even just to verify that the source code is still in
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a functioning state. We need something to exercise it and unit tests are the perfect
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thing to do that through continuous integration.
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So that's what this chapter is all about.