Lunch Talk Series: Easy, Breezy, Beautiful... Django Unit Tests

This iteration of the Lunch Talk Series will be covering Colleen Dunlap’s free-spirited DjangoCon US talk, “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful… Django Unit Tests”.

You should watch this if:

• You’re getting started writing tests
• You’re new to Django
• Want to quickly learn the important aspects of testing

This talk is broken up into two phases, the first is introducing unit testing. The second shows how to write tests with Django, explaining the various helpers provided. Throughout it Colleen’s personality, wit and humor are on display making a well tested topic interesting.

This talk does a fantastic job of exposing a person to several testing best practices. To name a few of the topics she introduces, test driven development, the factory pattern, mocking, assertion helpers, and extending the TestCase class.

This talk is packed with mentions, each are worth looking into more. However, Colleen does an amazing job of not overwhelming the audience. If you do hear something that sounds interesting, do some more research on it. Each of these have tons of information out there. One such resource is Adam Johnson’s book, “Speed Up Your Django Tests”.

I’m a big fan of Colleen’s presentation style. I found myself laughing at several of her offhand comments. It worked really well with the whole “punch and move” approach to explaining testing in Python and Django. For me, my takeaway is that I need to go review the Django assertion helpers. I’m definitely being inefficient sticking with the basics.