Test & Code

Apache Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.
 PySpark blends the powerful Spark big data processing engine with the Python programming language to provide a data analysis platform that can scale up for nearly any task.

Johnathan Rioux, author of "PySpark in Action", joins the show and gives us a great introduction of Spark and PySpark to help us decide how to get started and decide whether or not to decide if Spark and PySpark are right you.

Special Guest: Jonathan Rioux.

Links:

• PySpark in Action
• Spark
• PySpark documentation
• Joel Grus, livecoding

Hypothesis is the Python tool used for property based testing.
 Hypothesis claims to combine "human understanding of your problem domain with machine intelligence to improve the quality of your testing process while spending less time writing tests."

In this episode Alexander Hultnér introduces us to property based testing in Python with Hypothesis.

Some topics covered:

• What is property based testing
• Thinking differently for property based testing
• Using hypothesis / property based testing in conjunction with normal testing
• Failures saved and re-run
• What parts of development/testing is best suited for hypothesis / property based testing 
• Comparing function implementations
• Testing against REST APIs that use Open API / Swagger with schemathesis 
• Changing the number of tests in different test environments
• System, integration, end to end, and unit tests

Special Guest: Alexander Hultnér.

Links:

• Hypothesis home
• Hypothesis docs
• Test Fast, Fix More - Property based testing with Hypothesis by Alexander Hultnér - YouTube
• Quickcheck, Grandfather of property based testing
• Beyond Unit Tests, Hillel Wayne, PyCon 2018
• Better Testing With Less Code, Matt Bachmann, PyCon 2016
• Choosing properties for property-based testing (F#)
• schemathesis: Hypothesis + Open API / Swagger for testing web applications

IDEs can help people with automated testing.

In this episode, Paul Everitt and Brian discuss ways IDEs can encourage testing and make it easier for everyone, including beginners. We discuss features that exist and are great, as well as what is missing.

The conversation also includes topics around being welcoming to new contributors for both open source and professional projects.

We talk about a lot of topics, and it's a lot of fun. But it's also important. Because IDEs can make testing 

Some topics discussed:

• Making testing more accessible
• Test First vs teaching testing last
• TDD workflow
• Autorun
• Rerunning last failures
• Different ways to run different levels of tests
• Command line flags and how to access them in IDEs
• pytest.ini
• zooming in and out of test levels
• running parametrizations
• running tests with coverage and profiling
• parametrize vs parameterize
• parametrization identifiers
• pytest fixture support
• global configurations / configuration templates
• coverage and testing and being inviting to new contributors
• confidence in changes and confidence in contributions
• navigating code, tests, fixtures
• grouping tests in modules, classes, directories
• BDD, behavior driven development, cucumber, pytest-bdd
• web development testing
• parallel testing with xdist and IDE support
• refactor rename

Special Guest: Paul Everitt.

Links:

• Python Testing with pytest — The pytest book
• PyCharm
• PyCharm pro
• episode 54: Python 1994 - Paul Everitt
• pytest-xdist

The Test Anything Protocol, or TAP, is a way to record test results in a language agnostic way, predates XML by about 10 years, and is still alive and kicking.

Matt Layman has contributed to Python in many ways, including his educational newsletter, and his Django podcast, Django Riffs.

Matt is also the maintainer of tap.py and pytest-tap, two tools that bring the Test Anything Protocol to Python.

In this episode, Matt and I discuss TAP, it's history, his involvement, and some cool use cases for it.

Special Guest: Matt Layman.

Links:

• mattlayman.com
• Django Riffs, a podcast for learning Django · Matt Layman
• Test Anything Protocol
• pytest-tap: Test Anything Protocol (TAP) reporting plugin for pytest
• tappy - TAP tools for Python 

pytest is awesome by itself. pytest + plugins is even better.
 In this episode, Anthony Sottile and Brian Okken discuss the top 28 pytest plugins.

Some of the plugins discussed (we also mention a few plugins related to some on this list):

1.  pytest-cov
2.  pytest-timeout
3.  pytest-xdist
4.  pytest-mock
5.  pytest-runner
6.  pytest-instafail
7.  pytest-django
8.  pytest-html
9.  pytest-metadata
10. pytest-asyncio
11. pytest-split-tests
12. pytest-sugar
13. pytest-rerunfailures
14. pytest-env
15. pytest-cache
16. pytest-flask
17. pytest-benchmark
18. pytest-ordering
19. pytest-watch
20. pytest-pythonpath
21. pytest-flake8
22. pytest-pep8
23. pytest-repeat
24. pytest-pylint
25. pytest-randomly
26. pytest-selenium
27. pytest-mypy
28. pytest-freezegun

Honorable mention:

• pytest-black
• pytest-emoji
• pytest-poo

Special Guest: Anthony Sottile.

Links:

• PyPI Download Stats
• Top PyPI Packages: A monthly dump of the 4,000 most-downloaded packages from PyPI
• Test & Code 25: Selenium, pytest, Mozilla – Dave Hunt
• pre-commit

Django is without a doubt one of the most used web frameworks for Python. Lacey Williams Henschel is a Django consultant and has joined me to talk about Django, the Django community, and so much more.

Topics:

• Django
• The Django Community
• Django Girls
• Django Girls Tutorial
• DjangoCon
• Software Testing
• Using tests during learning
• pytest-django
• testing Django
• Wagtail

Special Guest: Lacey Williams Henschel.

Links:

• Django 
• Django Girls 
• Django Girls Tutorial
• DjangoCon US 2020 
• Django: Under the Hood
• PyData
• PyCascades
• Django REST framework
• pytest-django
• Wagtail CMS - Django Content Management System

Harry Percival has completed his second book, "Architecture Patterns with Python".
 So of course we talk about the book, also known as "Cosmic Python".
 We also discuss lots of testing topics, especially related to larger systems and systems involving third party interfaces and APIs.

Topics 

• Harry's new book, "Architecture Patterns with Python". a.k.a. Cosmic Python 
• TDD : Test Driven Development
• Test Pyramid
• Tradeoffs of different architectural choices
• Mocks and their pitfalls
• Avoiding mocks
• Separating conceptual business logic
• Dependency injection
• Dependency inversion
• Identifying external dependencies
• Interface adapters to mimize the exposed surface area of external dependencies
• London School vs Classic/Detroit School of TDD
• Testing strategies for testing external REST APIs

Links:

• Cosmic Python - Simple Patterns for Building Complex Applications
• Architecture Patterns with Python - on Amazon
• Harry Percival (@hjwp) / Twitter
• Bob Gregory (@bob_the_mighty) / Twitter
• vcrpy · PyPI
• Writing tests for external API calls
• Stop Using Mocks (for a while) - Harry's PyCon talk

Application security is best designed into a system from the start.
 Anthony Shaw is doing something about it by creating an editor plugin that actually helps you write more secure application code while you are coding.

On today's Test & Code, Anthony and I discuss his security plugin, but also application security in general, as well as other security components you need to consider.

Security is something every team needs to think about, whether you are a single person team, a small startup, or a large corporation.

Anthony and I also discuss where to start if it's just a few of you, or even just one of you.

Topics include:

• Finding security risks while writing code.
• What are the risks for your applications.
• Thinking about attack surfaces.
• Static and dynamic code analysis.
• Securing the environment an app is running in.
• Tools for scanning live sites for vulnerabilities.
• Secret management.
• Hashing algorithms.
• Authentication systems.
• and Anthony's upcoming cPython Internals book.

Special Guest: Anthony Shaw.

Links:

• Python Security - plugin for PyCharm
• Bandit
• Hack The Box 

Let's say you have a web application and you want to make some changes to improve it.
 You may want to A/B test it first to make sure you are really improving things.

But really what is A/B testing? 

That's what we'll find out on this episode with Leemay Nassery.

Special Guest: Leemay Nassery.

I play a form of group chess that has some interesting analogies to software development and maintenance of existing systems. This episode explains group chess and explores a few of those analogies.