Normally tests should not depend on each other - and it should be avoided as long as possible. Optimally each test should be able to run in isolation.
However there might be rare cases or special circumstances where one would want this. For example if having very slow integration tests where redoing what test A did just to run test B would simply be too costly. Or temporarily while testing or debugging. It's also possible that one wants some test to run first as 'smoke tests' such that the rest can be skipped if those tests fail.
The current implementation allows marking tests with the @depends
decorator
where it can be declared if the test needs to run before or after some
other specific test(s).
There is also support for skipping tests based on the dependency results, thus if test B depends on test A and test A fails then B will be skipped with the reason that A failed.
Nosedep also supports running the necessary dependencies for a single test, thus if you specify to run only test B and test B depends on A; then A will run before B to satisfy that dependency.
Note that 'before' dependencies are treated as soft. A soft dependency will only affect the test ordering, not force inclusion. For example if we have::
def test_a:
pass
@depends(before=test_a)
def test_b:
pass
and run all tests they would run in the order b,a. If you specify to run only either one of them only that test would run. However changing it to::
@depends(after=test_b)
def test_a:
pass
def test_b:
pass
would affect the case when you specify to run only test a, since it would have to run test b first to specify the 'after' dependency since it's a 'hard' dependency.
Finally there is prioritization support. Each test can be given an integer priority and the tests will run in order from lowest to highest. Dependencies take precedence so in total the ordering will be:
- All tests with a priority lower or equal to the default that are not part of any dependency chain ordered first by priority then by name.
- Dependency groups in order, while each dependency group is internally ordered the same as point 1.
- All tests with priority higher than the default that are not part of any dependency chain ordered first by priority then by name.
Default priority if not specified is 50.
Note: Currently no support for Python 2.6 and 3.2. Should work for 2.7 and 3.3+.