Re: Art of Unit Testing

Björn Lindström wrote: 
Would it make sense to add "globaleSetup" and "globalTearDown" methods
to the TestCase class?
In general that's not such a good idea.

I completely agree and I think it makes a lot of sense that unittest calls setUp and tearDown for every single test. However, the fact that this is *generally* the best way doesn't exclude the fact that there are *exceptions* when it makes sense to setUp and tearDown not for every test, e.g. when it is absolutely sure that the fixture cannot be destroyed by the individual tests or when creating the fixture takes too much time. I already gave the example of creating database connections or even creating/importing whole databases. My question was, how do I handle these cases with the standard lib unittest?

According to the "extreme programming" paradigm, testing should be done several times a day. So a requirement for extreme programm is that tests are fast enough. If the testing needs too much time, people are discouraged to test often.

-- Christoph
.

Relevant Pages