# Chapter 18: Testing and Continuous Integration - Chapter Draft

Nowadays, automated testing is a fundamental activity in software development. In this chapter you will see a survey of the tools available for Jython is this field, from common tools used in the Python world to aid with unit testing to more complex tools available in the Java world which can be extended or driven using Jython.

## Python Testing Tools

### UnitTest

First we will take a look at the most classic test tool available in Python: Unittest. It follows the conventions of most "xUnit" incarnations (like JUnit): You subclass from TestCase class, write test methods (which must have a name starting by "test" and optionally override the methods setup() and tearDown() which are executed around the test methods,. And you can use the multiple assert*() methods provided by TestCase. Here is an very simple test case for the some functions of the built-in math module:

import math
import unittest

class TestMath(unittest.TestCase):
def testFloor(self):
self.assertEqual(1, math.floor(1.01))
self.assertEqual(0, math.floor(0.5))
self.assertEqual(-1, math.floor(-0.5))
self.assertEqual(-2, math.floor(-1.1))

def testCeil(self):
self.assertEqual(2, math.ceil(1.01))
self.assertEqual(1, math.ceil(0.5))
self.assertEqual(0, math.ceil(-0.5))
self.assertEqual(-1, math.ceil(-1.1))


There are many other assertion methods besides assertEqual(), of course. Here is a list with the rest of the available assertion methods:

• assertNotEqual(a, b): The opposite of assertEqual()
• assertAlmostEqual(a, b): Only used for numeric comparison. It adds a sort of tolerance for insignificant differences, by subtracting its first two arguments after rounding them to the seventh decimal place, and later comparing the result to zero. You can specify a different number of decimal places in the third argument. This is useful for comparison of floating point numbers.
• assertNotAlmostEqual(a, b): The opposite of assertAlmostEqual()
• assert_(x): Accepts a boolean argument expecting it to be True. You can use it to write other checks like "greater than", or to check boolean functions/attributes (The trailing underscore is needed because assert is a keyword).
• assertFalse(x). The opposite of assert_().
• assertRaises(exception, callable). Used to assert that an exception passed as the first argument is thrown when invoking the callable specified as the second argument. The rest of arguments passed to assertRaises is passed on to the callable.

As an example, let's extend our test of mathematical functions using some of these other assertion functions:

import math
import unittest
import operator

class TestMath(unittest.TestCase):

# ...

def testMultiplication(self):
self.assertAlmostEqual(0.3, 0.1 * 3)

def testDivision(self):
self.assertRaises(ZeroDivisionError, operator.div, 1, 0)
# The same assertion using a different idiom:
self.assertRaises(ZeroDivisionError, lambda: 1 / 0)


Now, you may be wondering how to run this test case. The simple answer is to add the following to the file in which we defined it:

if __name__ == '__main__':
unittest.main()


Finally, just run the module. Say, if you wrote all this code on a file named test_math.py, then run:

$jython test_math.py  And you will see this output: .... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 4 tests in 0.005s OK  Each dot about the dash line represent a successfully ran test. Let see what happens if we add a test that fails. Change the invocation assertAlmostEqual() method in testMultiplication() to use assertEqual() instead. If you run the module again, you will see the following output: ...F ====================================================================== FAIL: testMultiplication (__main__.TestMath) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "test_math.py", line 22, in testMultiplication self.assertEqual(0.3, 0.1 * 3) AssertionError: 0.3 != 0.30000000000000004 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 4 tests in 0.030s FAILED (failures=1)  As you can see, the last dot is now an "F", and an explanation of the failure is printed, pointing out that 0.3 and 0.30000000000000004 are not equal. The last line also shows the grand total of 1 failure. By the way, now you can imagine why using assertEquals(x, y) is better than assert_(x == y): if the test fails, assertEquals() provides helpful information, which assert_() can't possibly provide by itself. To see this in action, let's change testMultiplication() to use assert_(): class TestMath(unittest.TestCase): #... def testMultiplication(self): self.assert_(0.3 == 0.1 * 3)  If you run the test again, the output will be: ...F ====================================================================== FAIL: testMultiplication (__main__.TestMath) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "test_math.py", line 24, in testMultiplication self.assert_(0.3 == 0.1 * 3) AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 4 tests in 0.054s FAILED (failures=1)  Now all what we have is the traceback and the "AssertionError" message. No extra information is provided to help us diagnostic the failure, as it was the case when we use assertEqual(). That's why all the specialized assert*() methods are so helpful. Actually, with the exception of assertRaises() all assertion methods accept an extra parameter meant to be the debugging message which will be shown in case the test fails. That lets you write helper methods like: class SomeTestCase(unittest.TestCase): def assertGreaterThan(a, b): self.assert_(a > b, '%d isn't greater than %d') def testSomething(self): self.assertGreaterThan(10, 4)  As your application gets bigger, the number of test cases will grow too. Eventually, you may not want to keep all the tests on one python module, for maintainability reasons. Let's create a new module, named test_lists.py with the following test code: import unittest class TestLists(unittest.TestCase): def setUp(self): self.list = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'] def testLen(self): self.assertEqual(3, len(self.list)) def testContains(self): self.assert_('foo' in self.list) self.assert_('bar' in self.list) self.assert_('baz' in self.list) def testSort(self): self.assertNotEqual(['bar', 'baz', 'foo'], self.list) self.list.sort() self.assertEqual(['bar', 'baz', 'foo'], self.list)  Note In the previous code you can see an example on a setUp() method, which allows us to avoid repeating the same initialization code on each test*() method. And, restoring our math tests to a good state, the test_math.py will contain the following: import math import unittest import operator class TestMath(unittest.TestCase): def testFloor(self): self.assertEqual(1, math.floor(1.01)) self.assertEqual(0, math.floor(0.5)) self.assertEqual(-1, math.floor(-0.5)) self.assertEqual(-2, math.floor(-1.1)) def testCeil(self): self.assertEqual(2, math.ceil(1.01)) self.assertEqual(1, math.ceil(0.5)) self.assertEqual(0, math.ceil(-0.5)) self.assertEqual(-1, math.ceil(-1.1)) def testDivision(self): self.assertRaises(ZeroDivisionError, operator.div, 1, 0) # The same assertion using a different idiom: self.assertRaises(ZeroDivisionError, lambda: 1 / 0) def testMultiplication(self): self.assertAlmostEqual(0.3, 0.1 * 3)  Now, how do we run, in one pass, tests defined in different modules? One option is to manually build a test suite. A test suite is a simply collection of test cases (and/or other test suites) which, when ran, will run all the test cases (and/or test suites) contained by it. Note that a new test case instance is built for each test method, so suites have already been build under the hood every time you have run a test module. Our work, then, is to "paste" the suites together. Let's build suites using the interactive interpreter! First, import the involved modules: >>> import unittest, test_math, test_lists  Then, we will obtain the test suites for each one of our test modules (which were implicitly created when running them using the unittest.main() shortcut), using the unittest.TestLoader class: >>> loader = unittest.TestLoader() >>> math_suite = loader.loadTestsFromModule(test_math) >>> lists_suite = loader.loadTestsFromModule(test_lists)  Now we build a new suite which combine these suites: >>> global_suite = unittest.TestSuite([math_suite, lists_suite])  And finally, we run the suite: >>> unittest.TextTestRunner().run(global_suite) ....... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 7 tests in 0.010s OK <unittest._TextTestResult run=7 errors=0 failures=0>  Or, if you feel like wanting a more verbose output: >>> unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(global_suite) testCeil (test_math.TestMath) ... ok testDivision (test_math.TestMath) ... ok testFloor (test_math.TestMath) ... ok testMultiplication (test_math.TestMath) ... ok testContains (test_lists.TestLists) ... ok testLen (test_lists.TestLists) ... ok testSort (test_lists.TestLists) ... ok ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 7 tests in 0.020s OK <unittest._TextTestResult run=7 errors=0 failures=0>  Using this low level knowledge about loaders, suites and runner you can easily write a script to run the tests of any project. Obviously, the details of the script will vary from project to project depending the way in which you decide to organize your tests. On the other hand, typically you won't write custom scripts to run all your tests. Using test tools which do automatic test discovery will be a much convenient approach. We will look one of them shortly. But first, I must show you other testing tool very popular in the Python world: doctests. ### Doctests Doctests are a very ingenious combination of, well, documentation and tests. A doctest is, in essence, no more than a snapshot of a interactive interpreter session, mixed with paragraphs of documentation, typically inside of a docstring. Here is a simple example: def is_even(number): """ Checks if an integer number is even. >>> is_even(0) True >>> is_even(2) True >>> is_even(3) False It works with very long numbers: >>> is_even(100000000000000000000000000000) True And also with negatives: >>> is_even(-1000000000000000000000000000001) False But not with floats: >>> is_even(4.1) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: 4.1 isn't an integer However, a value of type float as long as it value is an integer: >>> is_even(4.0) True """ remainder = number % 2 if 0 < remainder < 1: raise ValueError("%f isn't an integer" % number) return remainder == 0  Note that, if we weren't talking about testing, we may have thought that the docstring of is_even() is just normal documentation, in which the convention of using the interpreter prompt to mark example expressions and their outputs was adopted (also note also that irrelevant stack trace has been striped of in the exception example). After all, in many cases we use examples as part of the documentation. Take a look at Java's SimpleDateFormat documentation located in http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html and you will spot fragments like: • "...using a pattern of MM/dd/yy and a SimpleDateFormat instance created on Jan 1, 1997, the string 01/11/12 would be interpreted as Jan 11, 2012..." • "...01/02/3 or 01/02/003 are parsed, using the same pattern, as Jan 2, 3 AD..." • "..."01/02/-3" is parsed as Jan 2, 4 BC..." The magic of doctests if that it encourages the inclusion of these examples by doubling them as tests. Let's save our example code as even.py and add the following snippet at the end: if __name__ == "__main__": import doctest doctest.testmod()  Then, run it: $ jython even.py


And well, doctests are a bit shy and don't show any output on success. But to convince you that it is indeed testing our code, run it with the -v option:

$jython even.py -v Trying: is_even(0) Expecting: True ok Trying: is_even(2) Expecting: True ok Trying: is_even(3) Expecting: False ok Trying: is_even(100000000000000000000000000000) Expecting: True ok Trying: is_even(-1000000000000000000000000000001) Expecting: False ok Trying: is_even(4.1) Expecting: Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: 4.1 isn't an integer ok Trying: is_even(4.0) Expecting: True ok 1 items had no tests: __main__ 1 items passed all tests: 7 tests in __main__.is_even 7 tests in 2 items. 7 passed and 0 failed. Test passed.  Doctests are a very, very convenient way to do testing, since the interactive examples can be directly copy-pasted from the interactive shell, transforming the manual testing in documentation examples and automated tests in one shot. You don't really need to include doctests as part of the documentation of the feature they test. Nothing stops you to write the following code in, say, the test_math_using_doctest.py module: """ Doctests equivalent to test_math unittests seen in the previous section. >>> import math Tests for floor(): >>> math.floor(1.01) 1 >>> math.floor(0.5) 0 >>> math.floor(-0.5) -1 >>> math.floor(-1.1) -2 Tests for ceil(): >>> math.ceil(1.01) 2 >>> math.ceil(0.5) 1 >>> math.ceil(-0.5) 0 >>> math.ceil(-1.1) -1 Test for division: >>> 1 / 0 Traceback (most recent call last): ... ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero Test for floating point multiplication: >>> (0.3 - 0.1 * 3) < 0.0000001 True """ if __name__ == "__main__": import doctest doctest.testmod()  One thing to note on the last test in the previous example, is that in some cases doctests are not the most clean way to express a test. Also note that if that test fails you will not get useful information from the failure. It will tell you that the output was False when True was expected, without the extra details that assertAlmostEquals() would give you. The morale of the history is to realize that doctest is just another tool in the toolbox, which can fit very well in some cases and not fit well in others. Warning Speaking of doctests gotchas: The use of dictionary outputs in doctests is a very common error that breaks the portability of your doctests across Python implementations (e.g. Jython, CPython and IronPython) . The trap here is that the order of dict keys is implementation-dependent, so the test may pass when working on some implementation and fail horribly on others. The workaround is to convert the dict to a sequence of tuples and sort them, using sorted(mydict.items()). That shows the big downfall of doctests: It always does a textual comparison of the expression, converting the result to string. It isn't aware of the objects structure. To take advantage of doctests we have to follow some simple rules, like using the >>> prompt and leaving a blank line between sample output and the next paragraph. But if you think about it, it's the same kind of sane rules that makes the documentation readable by people. The only common rule not shown by the examples shown in this section is the way to write expressions which are written in more than one line. As you may expect, you have to follow the same convention used by the interactive interpreter: start the continuation lines with an ellipsis ("..."). For example: """ Addition is commutative: >>> ((1 + 2) == ... (2 + 1)) True """  ### A Complete Example Having seen the two test frameworks used in the Python world, let's see them applied to a more meaningful program. We will write code to check for solutions of the eight-queens chess puzzle. The idea of the puzzle is to place eight queens in a chessboard, with no queen attacking each other. Queens can attack any piece placed in the same row, column or diagonals. The figure :ref:fig-eightqueens shows one of the solutions of the puzzle. I like to use doctests to check the contract of the program with the outside, and unittest for what we could see as the internal tests. I do that because external interfaces tend to be clearly documented, and automated testing of the examples in the documentation is always a great thing. On the other hand, unittests shine on pointing us to the very specific source of a bug, or at the very least on providing more useful debugging information than doctests. Note In practice, both type of tests have strengths and weakness, and you may find some cases in which you will prefer the readability and simplicity of doctests and only use them on your project. Or you will favor the granularity and isolation of unittests and only use them on your project. As many things in life, it's a trade-off. We'll develop this program in a test-driven development fashion. Test will be written first, as a sort of specification for our program, and code will be written later to fulfill the tests requirements. Let's start by specifying the public interface of our puzzle checker, which will live on the eightqueen package. This is the start of the main module, eightqueen.checker: """ eightqueen.checker: Validates solutions for the eight queens puzzle. Provides the function is_solution(board) to determine if a board represents a valid solution of the puzzle. The chess board is represented by list of 8 strings, each string of length 8. Positions occupied by a Queen are marked by the character 'Q', and empty spaces are represented by an space character. Here is a valid board: >>> board = ['Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q'] Naturally, it is not a correct solution: >>> is_solution(board) False Here is a correct solution: >>> is_solution(['Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ']) True Malformed boards are rejected and a ValueError is thrown: >>> is_solution([]) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: Malformed board Only 8 x 8 boards are supported. >>> is_solution(['Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q ', ... ' Q']) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: Malformed board And they must only contains Qs and spaces: >>> is_solution(['X ', ... ' X ', ... ' X', ... ' X ', ... ' X ', ... ' X ', ... ' X ', ... ' X ']) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: Malformed board And the total number of Qs must be eight: >>> is_solution(['QQQQQQQQ', ... 'Q ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ']) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: There must be exactly 8 queens in the board >>> is_solution(['QQQQQQQ ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ', ... ' ']) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValueError: There must be exactly 8 queens in the board """  That's a good start: we know what we have to build. The doctests play the role of a more precise problem statement. Actually, it's an executable problem statement which can be used to verify our solution to the problem. Now we will specify the "internal" interface which shows how we can solve the problem of writing the solution checker. It's a common practice to write the unit tests on a separate module. So here is the code for eightqueens.test_checker: import unittest from eightqueens import checker BOARD_TOO_SMALL = ['Q' * 3 for i in range(3)] BOARD_TOO_BIG = ['Q' * 10 for i in range(10)] BOARD_WITH_TOO_MANY_COLS = ['Q' * 9 for i in range(8)] BOARD_WITH_TOO_MANY_ROWS = ['Q' * 8 for i in range(9)] BOARD_FULL_OF_QS = ['Q' * 8 for i in range(8)] BOARD_FULL_OF_CRAP = [chr(65 + i) * 8 for i in range(8)] BOARD_EMPTY = [' ' * 8 for i in range(8)] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_ROW = ['Q Q ', ' ', ' Q', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q '] BOARD_WITH_WRONG_SOLUTION = BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_ROW BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_COL = ['Q ', ' Q ', ' Q', 'Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q '] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_1 = [' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', 'Q ', ' Q '] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_2 = [' ', ' Q ', ' ', ' Q ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' '] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_3 = [' ', ' Q ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' Q ', ' ', ' '] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_4 = [' ', ' Q ', ' ', ' ', ' ', 'Q ', ' ', ' '] BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_5 = [' Q', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', 'Q '] BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION = ['Q ', ' Q ', ' Q', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q ', ' Q '] class ValidationTest(unittest.TestCase): def testValidateShape(self): def assertNotValidShape(board): self.assertFalse(checker._validate_shape(board)) # Some invalid shapes: assertNotValidShape([]) assertNotValidShape(BOARD_TOO_SMALL) assertNotValidShape(BOARD_TOO_BIG) assertNotValidShape(BOARD_WITH_TOO_MANY_COLS) assertNotValidShape(BOARD_WITH_TOO_MANY_ROWS) def assertValidShape(board): self.assert_(checker._validate_shape(board)) assertValidShape(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION) # Shape validation doesn't care about board contents: assertValidShape(BOARD_FULL_OF_QS) assertValidShape(BOARD_FULL_OF_CRAP) def testValidateContents(self): # Valid content => only 'Q' and ' ' in the board self.assertFalse(checker._validate_contents(BOARD_FULL_OF_CRAP)) self.assert_(checker._validate_contents(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) # Content validation doesn't care about the number of queens: self.assert_(checker._validate_contents(BOARD_FULL_OF_QS)) def testValidateQueens(self): self.assertFalse(checker._validate_queens(BOARD_FULL_OF_QS)) self.assertFalse(checker._validate_queens(BOARD_EMPTY)) self.assert_(checker._validate_queens(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) self.assert_(checker._validate_queens(BOARD_WITH_WRONG_SOLUTION)) class PartialSolutionTest(unittest.TestCase): def testRowsOK(self): self.assert_(checker._rows_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) self.assertFalse(checker._rows_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_ROW)) def testColsOK(self): self.assert_(checker._cols_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) self.assertFalse(checker._cols_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_COL)) def testDiagonalsOK(self): self.assert_(checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) self.assertFalse( checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_1)) self.assertFalse( checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_2)) self.assertFalse( checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_3)) self.assertFalse( checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_4)) self.assertFalse( checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_5)) class SolutionTest(unittest.TestCase): def testIsSolution(self): self.assert_(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) self.assertFalse(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_COL)) self.assertFalse(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_ROW)) self.assertFalse(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_QS_IN_THE_SAME_DIAG_5)) self.assertRaises(ValueError, checker.is_solution, BOARD_TOO_SMALL) self.assertRaises(ValueError, checker.is_solution, BOARD_FULL_OF_CRAP) self.assertRaises(ValueError, checker.is_solution, BOARD_EMPTY)  These unit tests propose a way to solve the problem, decomposing it in two big tasks (input validation and the actual verification of solutions) and each task is decomposed on a smaller portion meant to be implemented by a function. In some way, they are an executable design of the solution. So we have a mix of doctests and unit tests. How do we run all of them in one shot? Previously I showed you how to manually compose a test suite for unit tests belonging to different modules, so that may be an answer. And indeed, there is a way to add doctests to test suites: doctest.DocTestSuite(module_with_doctests). But, since we are working on a more real testing example, we will use a real world solution to this problem (as you can imagine, people got tired of the tedious work and more automated solutions appeared). ### Nose Nose is a tool for test discovery and execution. By default, nose tries to run tests on any module whose name starts with "test". You can override that, of course. In our case, the example code of the previous section follows the convention (the test module is named eightqueens.test_checker). We will use setuptools to install nose. Refer to Appendix A for instructions on how to install setuptools if you haven't installed it yet. Once you have setuptools installed, run: $ easy_install nose


Note

I'm assuming that the bin directory of the Jython installation is on your PATH. If it's not, you will have to explicitly type that path preceding each command like jython or easy_install with that path (i.e., you will need to type something like /path/to/jython/bin/easy_install instead of just easy_install)

Once nose is installed, an executable named nosetests will appear on the bin/ directory of your Jython installation. Let's try it, locating ourselves on the parent directory of eightqueens and running:

$nosetests --with-doctest  By default nose do not run doctests, so we have to explicitly enable the doctest plugin that comes built in with nose. Back to our example, here is the shortened output after running nose: FEEEEEE [Snipped output] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 8 tests in 1.133s FAILED (errors=7, failures=1)  Of course all of our tests (6 unit tests and 1 doctest) failed. It's time to fix that. But first, let's run nose again without the doctests, since we will follow the unit tests to construct the solution. And we know that as long as our unit tests fail, the doctest will also likely fail. Once all unit tests pass, we can check our whole program against the high level doctest and see if we missed something or did it right. Here is the nose output for the unit tests: $ nosetests
EEEEEEE
======================================================================
ERROR: testIsSolution (eightqueens.test_checker.SolutionTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 149, in testIsSolution
self.assert_(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'is_solution'

======================================================================
ERROR: testColsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 100, in testColsOK
self.assert_(checker._cols_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_cols_ok'

======================================================================
ERROR: testDiagonalsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 104, in testDiagonalsOK
self.assert_(checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_diagonals_ok'

======================================================================
ERROR: testRowsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 96, in testRowsOK
self.assert_(checker._rows_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_rows_ok'

======================================================================
ERROR: testValidateContents (eightqueens.test_checker.ValidationTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 81, in testValidateContents
self.assertFalse(checker._validate_contents(BOARD_FULL_OF_CRAP))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_validate_contents'

======================================================================
ERROR: testValidateQueens (eightqueens.test_checker.ValidationTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 88, in testValidateQueens
self.assertFalse(checker._validate_queens(BOARD_FULL_OF_QS))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_validate_queens'

======================================================================
ERROR: testValidateShape (eightqueens.test_checker.ValidationTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 65, in testValidateShape
assertNotValidShape([])
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 62, in assertNotValidShape
self.assertFalse(checker._validate_shape(board))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_validate_shape'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 7 tests in 0.493s

FAILED (errors=7)


Let's start clearing the failures by coding the validation functions specified by the ValidationTest. That is, the _validate_shape(), _validate_contents() and validate_queens() functions, in the eightqueens.checker module:

def _validate_shape(board):
return (board and
len(board) == 8 and
all(len(row) == 8 for row in board))

def _validate_contents(board):
for row in board:
for square in row:
if square not in ('Q', ' '):
return False
return True

def _count_queens(row):
n = 0
for square in row:
if square == 'Q':
n += 1
return n

def _validate_queens(board):
n = 0
for row in board:
n += _count_queens(row)
return n == 8


And now run nose again:

$nosetests EEEE... ====================================================================== ERROR: testIsSolution (eightqueens.test_checker.SolutionTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 149, in testIsSolution self.assert_(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'is_solution' ====================================================================== ERROR: testColsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 100, in testColsOK self.assert_(checker._cols_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_cols_ok' ====================================================================== ERROR: testDiagonalsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 104, in testDiagonalsOK self.assert_(checker._diagonals_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_diagonals_ok' ====================================================================== ERROR: testRowsOK (eightqueens.test_checker.PartialSolutionTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 96, in testRowsOK self.assert_(checker._rows_ok(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION)) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_rows_ok' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 7 tests in 0.534s FAILED (errors=4)  We passed all the validation tests! Now we should implement the functions _rows_ok(), _cols_ok() and _diagonals_ok() to pass PartialSolutionTest: def _scan_ok(board, coordinates): queen_already_found = False for i, j in coordinates: if board[i][j] == 'Q': if queen_already_found: return False else: queen_already_found = True return True def _rows_ok(board): for i in range(8): if not _scan_ok(board, [(i, j) for j in range(8)]): return False return True def _cols_ok(board): for j in range(8): if not _scan_ok(board, [(i, j) for i in range(8)]): return False return True def _diagonals_ok(board): for k in range(8): # Diagonal: (0, k), (1, k + 1), ..., (7 - k, 7)... if not _scan_ok(board, [(i, k + i) for i in range(8 - k)]): return False # Diagonal: (k, 0), (k + 1, 1), ..., (7, 7 - k) if not _scan_ok(board, [(k + j, j) for j in range(8 - k)]): return False # Diagonal: (0, k), (1, k - 1), ..., (k, 0) if not _scan_ok(board, [(i, k - i) for i in range(k + 1)]): return False # Diagonal: (7, k), (6, k - 1), ..., (k, 7) if not _scan_ok(board, [(7 - j, k + j) for j in range(8 - k)]): return False return True  Let's try nose again: $ nosetests

...E...
======================================================================
ERROR: testIsSolution (eightqueens.test_checker.SolutionTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/path/to/eightqueens/test_checker.py", line 149, in testIsSolution
self.assert_(checker.is_solution(BOARD_WITH_SOLUTION))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'is_solution'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 7 tests in 0.938s

FAILED (errors=1)


Finally, we have to assemble the pieces together to pass the test for is_solution():

def is_solution(board):
if not _validate_shape(board) or not _validate_contents(board):
raise ValueError("Malformed board")
if not _validate_queens(board):
raise ValueError("There must be exactly 8 queens in the board")
return _rows_ok(board) and _cols_ok(board) and _diagonals_ok(board)


And we can hope that all test pass now:

$nosetests ....... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 7 tests in 0.592s OK  Indeed, they all pass. Moreover, we probably also pass the "problem statement", test, expressed in our doctest: $ nosetests --with-doctest

........
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 8 tests in 1.523s

OK


Objective accomplished! We have come up with a nicely documented and tested module, using the two testing tools shipped with the Python language, and Nose to run all our tests without manually building suites.

### Integration with Java?

You may be wondering how to integrate the testing frameworks of Python and Java. It is possible to write JUnit tests in Jython, but it's not really interesting, considering that you can test Java classes using unittest and doctest. The following is a perfectly valid doctest:

"""
Tests for Java's DecimalFormat

>>> from java.text import DecimalFormat

A format for money:

>>> dolarFormat = DecimalFormat("$###,###.##") The decimal part is only printed if needed: >>> dolarFormat.format(1000) u'$ 1.000'

Rounding is used when there are more decimal numbers than those defined by the
format:

>>> dolarFormat.format(123456.789)
u'$123.456,79' The format can be used as a parser: >>> dolarFormat.parse('$ 123')
123L

The parser ignores the unparseable text after the number:

>>> dolarFormat.parse("$123abcd") 123L However, if it can't parse a number, it throws a ParseException: >>> dolarFormat.parse("abcd") Traceback (most recent call last): ... ParseException: java.text.ParseException: Unparseable number: "abcd" """  So you can use all what you learned on this chapter to test code written in Java. Personally, I find this a very powerful tool for Java development: easy, flexible and unceremonious testing using Jython and Python testing tools! ## Continuous Integration Martin Fowler defines Continuous Integration as "a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently [...]. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible". Some software development teams report to have used this practice as early as in the 1960, however it only became mainstream when advocated as part of the Extreme Programming practices. Nowadays, it is a widely applied practice, and in the Java world there is a wealth of tools to help with the technical challenge involved by it. ### Hudson One tool that currently has a lot of momentum, growing a important user base is Hudson. Among its prominent features are the ease of installation and configuration, and the ease to deploy it in a distributed, master/slaves environment for cross-platform testing. But, in my opinion, Hudson's main strength is its highly modular, plugin-based architecture, which has resulted in the creation of plugins to support most of the version control, build and reporting tools, and many languages. One of them is the Jython plugin, which allows you to use the Python language to drive your builds. You can find a more details about the Hudson project on its homepage at https://hudson.dev.java.net/. I will go to the point and show how to test Jython applications using it. ### Getting Hudson Grab the latest version of Hudson from http://hudson-ci.org/latest/hudson.war. You can deploy it to any servlet container like Tomcat or Glassfish. But one of the cool features of Hudson is that you can test it by simply running: $ java -jar hudson.war


After a few seconds, you will see some logging output on the console, and Hudson will be up and running. If you visit http://localhost:8080/ you will get a welcome page inviting you to start using Hudson creating new jobs. .. warning:

Be careful: The default mode of operation of Hudson fully trusts its users,
letting them to execute any command they want on the server, with the
privileges of the user running Hudson. You can set stricter access control
policies on the "Configure System" section of the "Manage Hudson" page.


### Installing the Jython Plugin

Before creating jobs, we will install the Jython plugin. Click on the "Manage Hudson" link on the left side menu. Then click "Manage Plugins". Now go to the "Available" tab. You will see a very long list of plugins (I told you this was the greatest Hudson strength!). Find the "Jython Plugin", click on the checkbox at its left, as shown on the figure :ref:fig-hudson-selectingjythonplugin then scroll to the end of the page and click the "Install" button.

You will see a bar showing the progress of the download and installation progress, and after little while you will be presented with an screen like shown on the figure :ref:fig-hudson-jythonplugininstalled notifying you that the process finished. Press the "Restart" button, wait a little bit and you will see the welcome screen again. Congratulations, you now have a Jython-powered Hudson!

### Creating a Hudson Job for a Jython Project

Let's follow now the suggestion of the welcome screen and click the "create new job" link. A job roughly corresponds to the instructions needed by Hudson to build a project. It includes:

• The location from where the source code of the project should be obtained, and how often.
• How to start the build process for the project
• How to collect information after the build process has finished

After clicking the "create new job" link (equivalent to the "New Job" entry on the left side menu) you will be asked for a name and type for the Job. We will use the eightqueens project built on the previous section, so name the project "eightqueens", select the "Build a free-style software project" option and press the "OK" button.

In the next screen, we need to setup an option on the "Source Code Management" section. You may want to experiment with your own repositories here (by default only CVS and Subversion are supported, but there are plugins for all the other VCSs used out there). For our example, I've hosted the code on a Subversion repository at http://kenai.com/svn/jythonbook~eightqueens/. So select "Subversion" and enter http://kenai.com/svn/jythonbook~eightqueens/trunk/eightqueens/ as the "Repository URL".

Note

Using the public repository will be enough to get a feeling of Hudson and its support of Jython. However, I encourage you to create your own repository so you can play freely with continuous integration, for example committing bad code to see how failures are handled.

In the "Build Triggers" section we have to specify when automated builds will happen. We will poll the repository so that a new build will be started after any change. Select "Poll SCM" and enter "@hourly" on the "Schedule" box (If you want to know all the options for the schedule, click the help icon at the right of the box).

In the "Build" section we must tell Hudson how to build our project. By default Hudson supports Shell scripts, Windows Batch files and Ant scripts as build steps. For projects in which you mix Java and Python code and drive the build process with an ant file, the default Ant build step will suffice. In our case, we wrote our app in pure Python code, so we will use the Jython plugin which adds the "Execute Jython script" build step.

So click on "Add Build Step" and then select "Execute Jython script". We will use our knowledge of test suites gained on the UnitTest section, the following script will be enough to run our tests:

import os, sys, unittest, doctest
from eightqueens import checker, test_checker

doctest.DocTestSuite(checker)])
result = unittest.TextTestRunner().run(suite)
print result
if not result.wasSuccessful():
sys.exit(1)


The figure :ref:fig-hudson-jobconfig shows how the page looks so far for the "Source Code Management", "Build Triggers" and "Build" sections.

The next section, titled "Post-build Actions" let you specify action to carry once the build has finished, ranging from collecting results from reports generated by static-analysis tools or test runners to send emails notifying someone of build breakage. We will left these options blank by now. Click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page.

At this point Hudson will show the job's main page. But it won't contain anything useful, since Hudson is waiting for the hourly trigger to poll the repository and kick the build. But we don't need to wait if we don't want to: just click the "Build Now" link on the left-side menu. Shortly, a new entry will be shown on the "Build History" box (also on the left side, below the menu), as shown in the figure :ref:fig-hudson-buildhistory.

If you click on the link that just appeared there you will be directed to the page for the build we just made. If you click on the "Console Output" link on the left side menu you will see what's shown in the figure :ref:fig-hudson-buildresult.

As you would expect, it shows that our eight tests (remember that we had seven unit tests and the module doctest) all passed.

### Using Nose on Hudson

You may be wondering why we crafted a custom build script instead of using nose, since I stated that using nose was much better than manually creating suites.

The problem is that the Jython runtime provided by the Jython Hudson plugin comes without any extra library, so we can't assume the existence of nose. One option would be to include nose with the source tree on the repository, but it is not convenient.

One way to overcome the problem is to script the installation of nose on the build script. Go back to the Job (also called "Project" by the Hudson user interface), select "Configure" on the left side menu, go the the "Build" section of the configuration and change the Jython script for our job to:

# Setup the environment
import os, sys, site, urllib2, tempfile
print "Base dir", os.getcwdu()
site_dir = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'site-packages')
if not os.path.exists(site_dir): os.mkdir(site_dir)
sys.executable = ''
os.environ['PYTHONPATH'] = ':'.join(sys.path)

# Get ez_setup:
ez_setup_path = os.path.join(site_dir, 'ez_setup.py')
if not os.path.exists(ez_setup_path):
f = file(ez_setup_path, 'w')
f.close()

# Install nose if not present
try:
import nose
except ImportError:
import ez_setup
ez_setup.main(['--install-dir', site_dir, 'nose'])
for mod in sys.modules.keys():
if mod.startswith('nose'):
del sys.modules[mod]
for path in sys.path:
if path.startswith(site_dir):
sys.path.remove(site_dir)
import nose

# Run Tests!
nose.run(argv=['nosetests', '-v', '--with-doctest', '--with-xunit'])


The first half of the script is plumbing to download setuptools (ez_setup) and set an environment in which it will work. Then, we check for the availability of nose, and if it's not present we install it using setuptools.

The interesting part if the last line:

nose.run(argv=['nosetests', '-v', '--with-doctest', '--with-xunit'])


Here we are invoking nose from python code, but using the command line syntax. Note the usage of the --with-xunit option. It generates JUnit-compatible XML reports for our tests, which can be read by Hudson to generate very useful test reports. By default, nose will generate a file called nosetests.xml on the current directory.

To let Hudson know where the report can be found scroll to the "Post Build Actions" section in the configuration, check the "Publish JUnit test result reports" and enter "nosetests.xml" on the "Test Report XMLs" input box. Press "Save". If Hudson points you that nosetests.xml "doesn't match anything", don't worry and just press "Save" again. Of course it doesn't match anything yet since we haven't run the build again.

Trigger the build again, and after the build is finished, click on the link for it (on the "Build History" box or going to the job page and following the "Last build [...]" permalink). The figure :ref:fig-hudson-consolewithnose shows what you see if you look at the "Console Output" and the figure :ref:fig-hudson-testresults what you see on the "Test Results" page.

Navigation on your test results is a very powerful feature of Hudson. But it shines when you have failures or tons of tests, which is not the case on this example. But I wanted to show it in action, so I fabricated some failures on the code to show you some screenshots. Look at figure :ref:fig-hudson-testresultswithfailures and figure :ref:fig-hudson-testresultsgraph to get an idea of what you get from Hudson.

We had to use a slightly more complicated script to use Nose and Hudson together, but it has the advantage that it will probably work untouched for a long time, unlike the original script manually built the suite, which would have to be modified each time a new test module is created.

### Conclusion

Testing is a fertile ground for Jython usage, since you can exploit the flexibility of Python to write concise tests for Java APIs which also tend to be more readable than the ones written with JUnit. Doctests, in particular don't have a parallel on the Java world and can be a powerful way to introduce the practice of automated testing on people who want it to be simple and easy.

Integration with continuous integration tools, and Hudson in particular let's you get the maximum from your tests, avoiding test breakages to go unnoticed and representing a live history of your project health and evolution.