Why don't we use *Pytest* in our tests?

[saroad2]

So this question was bugging me for some time.

As for the moment of writing this post, Toga uses Pytest as the tests runner via Tox, but it does not use it as a library inside the actual tests. instead, we only use the default unittest library.

Pytest has a lot to offer as a testing framework:

1. Fixtures that can be used in multiple tests and reduce a lot of lines of code
2. A big collection of cool plugins that can help us with our testing. My favorite plugin is pytest-cases which can be used to create Data-Driven-Tests (DDT) in a very easy way.
3. easy ways of parametrizing, skipping and debugging
4. A vast community that keep improving the Pytest library
5. etc.

Pytest is definately not the only python testing framework out there. There are nose, testify, lattuce and others.
I think that of all the possible options, keeping with unittest is my least favorite. Even though it comes out-of-the-box, it's a little bit outdated in todays standards.

If we do choose to adopt a testing framework, the change does not have to happen immidiately. We can start slowly convert new tests to the framework when we get there.

Those are my thoughts. I would love to hear what you think.

[freakboy3742]

Completely agreed that a move to pytest is warranted.

We're already using pytest to run the test suite. The only reason that we aren't using pytest tests is legacy. When I started Toga, I wasn't a pytest convert, and as a result, there's a lot of older tests (and, more importantly, test infrastructure) that uses unittest.

Modernising the test suite (and cleaning out a lot of the cruft of the test suite) is one of the housekeeping/foundation pieces of work that I'm hoping to tackle over the coming months. That will likely involve migrating to pytest in some fashion.