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The Testing Goat

Obey the Testing Goat!

TDD for the Web, with Python, Selenium, Django, JavaScript and pals...

Cosmic Python

Wed 03 June 2020
By Harry

Folks I've written a new book!

Along with my coauthor Bob, we are proud to release "Architecture Patterns with Python", which you can find out more about at cosmicpython.com.

The cosmic soubriquet is a little joke, Cosmos being the opposite of Chaos in ancient Greek, so we want to propose patterns to minimise chaos in your applications.

But the subtitle of the book is Enabling TDD, DDD, and Event-Driven Microservices, and the TDD part is relevant to this blog, and fans of the Testing Goat. In my two years at MADE and working with Bob, I've refined some of my thinking and some of the ways I approach testing, and I think if I were writing TTDwP again today, I might change the way I present some things.

In brief:

  • Mocking is not the only way to handle external (I/O et al) dependencies for your unit tests. Other techniques are possible, and often offer major benefits

  • If you really want to get to a test pyramid (where unit tests outnumber slow/e2e/integration tests by an order of magnitude), then you'll probably need to make some specific design choices around identifying business logic and decoupling it from infrastructure code.

  • When deciding what kind of unit tests to write, there's a lot to be said for writing them at the highest level of abstraction possible. It gives you more room to refactor later.

If you're curious about those questions, head on over to cosmicpython.com, and let me know what you think!

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Read the book

The book is available both for free and for money. It's all about TDD and Web programming. Read it here!

Reviews & Testimonials

"Hands down the best teaching book I've ever read""Even the first 4 chapters were worth the money""Oh my gosh! This book is outstanding""The testing goat is my new friend"Read more...

Resources

A selection of links and videos about TDD, not necessarily all mine, eg this tutorial at PyCon 2013, how to motivate coworkers to write unit tests, thoughts on Django's test tools, London-style TDD and more.

Old TDD / Django Tutorial

This is my old TDD tutorial, which follows along with the official Django tutorial, but with full TDD. It badly needs updating. Read the book instead!

Save the Testing Goat Campaign

The campaign page, preserved for history, which led to the glorious presence of the Testing Goat on the front of the book.