This session is aimed at an "intermediate" testing audience; labels like intermediate are always a bit dangerous, so to be more specific, I mean people who've learned a bit about testing, have tried it out a bit, and are starting to encounter some of the real-world problems of what to mock and what not to mock, and to wonder about best practices.

This workshop is based on a simple, practical example, where we'll go through a "pragmatic", non-mocky approach, and contrast it with a "purist", highly isolated approach, and see how it illustrates the strength and weaknesses of both approaches. Hopefully we will conclude with a little discussion of how to get the best out of our tests, based on what it is we want from them.

preparation required!

this is a hands-on workshop, so come with a laptop and prepared to follow along. if you don't then the workshop will be quite boring!

Here's what you need:

• Firefox
• Geckodriver
• A checkout of the example repo
• and a virtualenv with Python 3.6, django and selenium in it.

more details:

1. download the example code and create your virtualenv

git clone https://github.com/hjwp/book-example/ tdd-workshop
cd tdd-workshop
git checkout intermediate-workshop-start
mkvirtualenv --python=python3.6 tdd-workshop  # or however you like to create virtualenvs
pip install -r requirements.txt

2. download geckodriver from here, unzip it and check it works:

geckodriver --version
geckodriver 0.19.0
...

On windows it's usually fine to just have the binary in the same folder as your python project (eg next to manage.py). On linux + macos, you'll need to put the geckodriver binary somewhere on your path and make sure it's executable from anywhere.

There are some more tips and hints in the installations chapter of my book.

3. Take a look around the example site with:

mkdir ../database
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

it's a very simple to-do lists site... most of the code of interest is in lists/models.py and lists/views.py

4. Run the test suite and check everything works:

pip install selenium fabric3
python manage.py test

You should see it run 60 tests and all but one should pass. The expected error is Unable to locate element: My lists

If anything doesn't look right, you need to fix it before the workshop!

There are some detailed installation instructions here

If firefox+geckodriver really refuses to work, you can try switching from webdriver.Firefox() to webdriver.Chrome(). You will need to download a thing called "chromedriver" (google it) and have it on the path.

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Any problems, do ping me on the conference slack, or email me at obeythetestinggoat@gmail.com