BDD stands for Behavior Driven Development. You can go straight to the horse’s mouth for all the details, but for the purposes of this post, when I talk about a “BDD-style” test, I mean a test that reads like a sentence describing some behavior of the object being tested. And I do mean sentence. For example, instead of:

test_post_publisher

you want:

PostPublisher:
- sets published_at to given date
- emits post_published event with post id
- does nothing for published posts

If you haven’t already, you really should read Dan North’s introduction of BDD for all the ways tests like these can improve your development process.

This way, your test suite should read like a set of requirements or specifications. In fact, BDD-style tests are usually referred to as “specs”.

To get there, you can use nose (a handy extension to python’s unittest) with the pinocchio plugin (a handy set of extensions to nose).

pip install nose
pip install pinocchio

and write your tests with a structure like this:

class Test[the thing being tested](TestCase):
    def test_[sentence describing the behavior](self):
        ...

For example:

from unittest import TestCase


class TestPostPublisher(TestCase):
    def test_sets_published_at_to_given_date(self):
        ...

    def test_emits_post_published_event_with_post_id(self):
        ...

    def test_does_nothing_for_published_posts(self):
        ...

Then run nosetests with the --with-spec option provided (by pinocchio) and you should see your beautiful specs instead of a boring row of dots.

But wait, since all of the underscores are turned into spaces, the specs that mention variable names are a bit confusing (e.g. “published at” instead of “published_at”). You can fix that with docstrings. If nose sees one, it will use that instead of converting the Class or method name. For example:

def test_sets_published_at_to_given_date(self):
    """sets published_at to given date"""
    ...

You can also use the --spec-color option to easily see the status of your specs (yellow: pending, red: fail, green: pass).

If you want to write specs like this with Django, configure nose as your test runner in settings.py with:

TEST_RUNNER = 'django_nose.NoseTestSuiteRunner'
NOSE_ARGS = ['--with-spec', '--spec-color']

This only covers the specific nuts and bolts of getting spec output with python. I hope this marks my return to blogging, because I have lot more to say on the subject of testing in general.