Test & Code

Why on earth would you want to write a test with no assert statements?
After all, aren't assert statements how you decide wether a test passes or fails?

In this episode, we walk through a handful of useful examples of test code without asserts.
We also talk about how these types of tests are a great way to dip your toe into testing.

• New course: "The Complete pytest Course"
• pytest-repeat, which I'm starting to contribute to
  • Give `--repeat-scope` a try. You can use it to change from repeating every test to repeating the session, module, or class.
• pytest-flakefinder, which is an alternative to pytest-repeat
• pytest-check is completely unrelated, but mentioned in the show

TDD (Test Driven Development) started from Test First Programming, and has been around at least since the 90's.

However, software tools and available CI systems have changed quite a bit since then.
Maybe it's time to re-examine the assumptions, practices, processes, and principles of TDD.
 
At least in the context of my software engineering career, modifications to TDD, at least the version of TDD as it's frequently taught, have been necessary.

This is the start of a series focused on examining TDD and related lightweight practices and processes.

Links from the show:

• From XP
  • Test First
  • Unit Tests
  • Acceptance Tests
• Test-Driven Development (wikipedia)

On a recent episode of PythonBytes, I suggested it's hard to come up with good examples for pytest autouse fixtures, as there aren't very many good reasons to use them.  James Falcon was kind enough to reach out and correct me. 

In this episode, we describe:

• what fixtures are
• what autouse fixtures are
• great reasons to use them

Learn how to write nonfiction fast and well.
Johanna Rothman joins the show to discuss writing nonfiction.

Johanna's book: Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer

Open Source is important to Intel and has been for a very long time.

Joe Curley, vice president and general manager of software products and ecosystem, and Arun Gupta, vice president and general manager for open ecosystems, join the show to discuss open source, OneAPI, and open ecosystems at Intel.

Hynek joins the show to discuss towncrier. 

At the top of the towncrier documentation, it says "towncrier is a utility to produce useful, summarized news files (also known as changelogs) for your project."

Towncrier is used by "Twisted, pytest, pip, BuildBot, and attrs, among others."

This is the last of 3 episodes focused on keeping a CHANGELOG. 

Episode 200 kicked off the series with keepachangelog.com and Olivier Lacan
In 201 we had Ned Batchelder discussing scriv.

Special Guest: Hynek Schlawack.

Links:

• Towncrier docs
• How to Keep a Changelog in Markdown - Towncrier docs
• Keep a Changelog
• structlog/CHANGELOG.md — Example of manually edited changelog.
• hatch-fancy-pypi-readme
• MyST Markdown 
• hatchling

Last week we talked about the importance of keeping a changelog.
 This week we talk with Ned Batchelder about scriv, a tool to help maintain that changelog.

Scriv "is a command-line tool for helping developers maintain useful changelogs. It manages a directory of changelog fragments. It aggregates them into entries in a CHANGELOG file."

Links:

• nedbat/scriv: Changelog management tool

A changelog is a file which contains a curated, chronologically ordered list of notable changes for each version of a project.
 This episode is about what a changelog is, with an interview with Olivier Lacan, creator of keepachangelog.com.
The next two episodes talk about some tools to help software project teams keep changelogs while avoiding merge conflicts. 

Special Guest: Olivier Lacan.

Links:

• Shields.io
• Keep a Changelog
• "The Changelog" Podcast interview with Olivier Lacan
• An Open Source Rage Diamond

For a web side project to go from "working on desktop" to "live in the cloud", one decision that needs to be made is where to host everything. One option is Microsoft Azure. Lots of corporate sites use it. Is it right for side projects? 

Pamela Fox, a Cloud Advocate for Python at Microsoft, joins the show to help us with that question.

Links:

• Python Bytes Episode #323
• pamelafox gitHub projects
• Deploy a Python (Django or Flask) web app to Azure
• Hosting Python Web Apps on Azure: A Price-Off
• Deploying a containerized FastAPI app to Azure Container Apps
• Getting started with hosting Python apps on Azure
• Pricing Calculator for Azure
• App Service Pricing 
• pamelafox/flask-db-quiz-example
• Tutorial: Deploy a Python Django or Flask web app with PostgreSQL
• Pamela Fox on Mastodon