Nicole is a software engineer and writer, and recently wrote about the trade-offs we make when deciding which tests to write and how much testing is enough. We talk about: Balancing schedule vs testing How much testing is the right about of testing Should code coverage be measured and tracked Good refactoring can reduce code coverage Is it worth testing error conditions? Are rare error codes ok to just monitor? API drift and autospec Mitigating risk Deciding what to test and what not to test Focus testing on key money-making features  If there's a bug in this part of the code, how much b ..read more

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast or a SaaS project, you'll want to listen to this episode.   Justin is one of the people who motivated me to get started podcasting. He's also running a successful SaaS company, transistor.fm, which hosts this podcast. Topics: Podcasting Building new SaaS (software as a service) products Balancing work, side hustle, and family Great places to snowboard in British Columbia BTW. This episode was recorded last summer before I switched to transistor.fm. I'm now on Transistor for most of a year now, and I love it. Links from the show: Transisto ..read more

Charlie Marsh and team are using Rust to make Python tooling faster. Ruff can take the place of Flake8, isort, and Black, and so much more. uv can take the place of pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv Astral is Charlie's venture backed company, and what they have with `ruff` and `uv` is just the start. Since uv is the newest tool, there's quite a bit of the discussion diving into uv. Links: ruff Astral uv Sponsored by PyCharm Pro Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharm First 10 to sign up this month get a free month of AI Assistant See how easy it is to run p ..read more

Software engineers that move into leadership roles have a struggle between learning leadership skills, maintaining technical skills, and learning new leadership and technical skills.  Matt Makai went from individual contributor to developer relations to leadership in devrel.  We discuss how to stay technical, as well as dive into some results of his studies in how companies use developer relationship channels. Sponsored by PyCharm Pro Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharm First 10 to sign up this month get a free month of AI Assistant See how eas ..read more

If you haven't tried running automated tests, especially with pytest,  in VS Code recently, you should take another look. The Python for VS Code interface for testing, especially for pytest, has changed recently.  On this episode we discuss the change with the software engineer working on the pytest changes, Eleanor Boyd, and the product manager, Courtney Webster.  Links from the episode: Blog post announcing the rewrite   Code repo for questions, comments, issues etc The Complete pytest Course Level up your testing skills and save time during coding and maintenance. Ch ..read more

If a test fails in a test suite, I'm going to want to re-run the test. I may even want to re-run a test, or a subset of the suite, a bunch of times.   There are a few pytest plugins that help with this: pytest-repeat pytest-rerunfailures pytest-flakefinder pytest-instafail We talk about each of these in this episode. Sponsored by PyCharm Pro Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharm First 10 to sign up this month get a free month of AI Assistant See how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharm The Complete pytest Course For the ..read more

In 2002, Kent Beck released a book called  "Test Driven Development by Example". In December of 2023, Kent wrote an article called "Canon TDD". With Kent's permission, this episode contains the full content of the article. Brian's commentary is saved for a followup episode. Links: Canon TDD Test Driven Development by Example The Complete pytest Course Level up your testing skills and save time during coding and maintenance. Check out courses.pythontest.com ..read more

We want to be able to run tests in a suite, and debug them in isolation, and have the behavior be the same.   If the behavior is different in isolation vs in a suite, it's a nightmare to debug.  In this episode, we'll talk about: Causes of dependence Testing for dependencies using plugins Debugging test dependencies Plugins discussed: pytest-randomly pytest-reverse pytest-random-order Sponsored by PyCharm Pro Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharm First 10 to sign up this month get a free month of AI Assistant See how easy it is to run pytest ..read more

Test Driven Development. Red, Green, Refactor.  Do we have to do the refactor part?  Does the refactor at the end include tests?  Or can I refactor the tests at any time? Why is refactor at the end?  This episode is to talk about this with a an example. Sponsored by PyCharm Pro Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharm First 10 to sign up this month get a free month of AI Assistant See how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharm The Complete pytest Course For the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythont ..read more

How do you test the argument parsing bit of an application that uses argparse? This episode covers: Design for Test: Structuring your app or script so it's easier to test. pytest & capsys for testing stdout Adding debug and preview flags for debugging and testing And reverting to subprocess.run if you can't modify the code under test Also, there's a full writeup and code samples available: Blog post: Testing argparse Applications  Code Repo The Complete pytest Course For the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.com Whether your new to testing or pytest, or just ..read more