July 23, 2018

Michael Foord On Testing, Mock, TDD, And The Python Community

55 minutes

Summary

Michael Foord has been working on building and testing software in Python for over a decade. One of his most notable and widely used contributions to the community is the Mock library, which has been incorporated into the standard library. In this episode he explains how he got involved in the community, why testing has been such a strong focus throughout his career, the uses and hazards of mocked objects, and how he is transitioning to freelancing full time.

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Michael Foord mockingly, about his career in Python

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

One of the main threads in your career appears to be software testing. What aspects of testing do you find so interesting and how did you first get exposed to that aspect of building software?

How has the language and ecosystem support for testing evolved over the course of your career?

What are some of the areas that you find it to still be lacking?

Mock is one of your projects that has been widely adopted and ultimately incorporated into the standard library. What was your reason for starting it in the first place?

Mocking can be a controversial topic. What are your current thoughts on how and when to use mocks, stubs, and fixtures?

How do you view the state of the art for testing in Python as it compares to other languages that you have worked in?

You were fairly early in the move to supporting Python 2 and 3 in a single project with Mock. How has that overall experience changed in the intervening years since Python 2.4 and 3.2?

What are some of the notable evolutions in Python and the software industry that you have experienced over your career?

You recently transitioned to acting as a software trainer and consultant full time. Where are you focusing your energy currently and what are your grand plans for the future?

Keep In Touch

Website

Twitter

Picks

Tobias

-Ology Books

Michael

Imaginary Authors

Falling Into The Sea

City On Fire

Links

IronPython

London

IronPython in Action

Mock

UnitTest

Play By Email

Smalltalk

Regular Expression

Dijkstra’s Algorithm

urllib2

Resolver Systems

TDD (Test-Driven Development)

PyCon

Trent Nelson

Fractals

Unicode

Joel Spolsky (Unicode)

OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)

End-to-end Testing

Unit Testing

Canonical

Selenium

Ansible

Ansible Tower

AWX (Open Source Tower Codebase)

Continuous Integration

Continuous Delivery

Agile Software Development

GitHub

GitLab

Jenkins

Nightwatch.js

py.test

Martin Fowler

Monkey Patching

Decorator

Context Manager

autospec

Golang

2to3

Six

Instagram Keynote

Trans-code

Django Girls

PyLadies

Agile Abstractions

David Beazley

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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