Wandering Thoughts archives

2019-02-20

The cliffs in the way of adding tests to our Django web app

Back in August of last year, I wrote that it was time for me to start adding tests to our Django web app. Since then, the number of tests I have added is zero, and in fact the amount of work that I have done on our Django web app's code is also essentially zero (partly because it hasn't needed any modifications). Part of the reason for that is that adding tests feels like make-work, even though I know perfectly well that it's not really, but another part of it is that I'm staring at two reasonably substantial cliffs in my way.

Put simply, in order to add tests that I actually want to keep, I need to learn how to write Django tests and then I need to figure out what we want to test in our Django web app (and how). Learning how to write tests means reading through the Django documentation on this, both the quick tutorial and the real documentation. Unfortunately I think that I need to read all of the documentation before I start writing any tests, and possibly even plan to throw away the first round of tests as a learning experience. Testing a Django app is not as simple as testing standalone code; there is a test database you need to construct, an internal HTTP client so that you can write end to end tests, and so on. This is complicated by the fact that by now I've forgotten a lot of my general Django knowledge and I know it, so to some extent I'm going to have to re-learn Django (and re-learn our web app's code too).

(It's possible that I can find some quick-start tests I can write more or less in isolation. There are probably some stand-alone functions that I can poke at, and perhaps even stand-alone model behavior that doesn't depend on the database having a set of interlinked base data.)

Once I sort of know how to write Django tests, I need to figure out what tests to write and how much of them. There are two general answers here that I already know; we need tests that will let us eventually move to Python 3 with some confidence that the app won't blow up, and I'd like tests that will do at least basic checks that everything is fine when we move from Django version to Django version. Tests for a Python 3 migration should probably concentrate on the points where data moves in and out of our app, following the same model I used when I thought about DWiki's Python 3 Unicode issues. Django version upgrade tests should probably start by focusing on end to end testing (eg, 'can we submit a new account request through the mock HTTP client and have it show up').

All of this adds up to a significant amount of time and work to invest before we start to see real benefits from it. As a result I've kept putting it off and finding higher priority work to do (or at least more interesting work). And I'm pretty sure I need to find a substantial chunk of time in order to get anywhere with this. To put it one way, the Django testing documentation is not something that I want to try to understand in fifteen minute blocks.

PS: It turns out that our app actually has one tiny little test that I must have added years ago as a first step. It's actually surprisingly heartening to find it there and still passing.

(As before, I'm writing this partly to push myself toward doing it. We now have less than a year to the nominal end of Python 2, which is not much time with everything going on.)

Sidebar: Our database testing issue

My impression is that a decent amount of Django apps can be tested with basically empty databases, perhaps putting in a few objects. Our app doesn't work that way; its operation sits on top of a bunch of interlinked data on things like who can sponsor accounts, how those accounts should be created, and so on. Without that data, the app does nothing (in fact it will probably fail spectacularly, since it assumes that various queries will always return some data). That means we need an entire set of at least minimal data in our test database in order to test anything much. So I need to learn all about that up front, more or less right away.

DjangoMyTestingCliffs written at 00:20:30; Add Comment


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