Testing with py.test
The Python unittest module is very verbose and requires a lot of boilerplate code to set up and initialize tests. It is based on the very popular JUnit testing framework for Java. It even uses the same method names (you may have noticed they don't conform to the PEP-8 naming standard, which suggests underscores be used to separate words in a method name, rather than CamelCase) and test layout. While this is effective for testing in Java, it's not necessarily the best design for Python testing.
Because Python programmers like their code to be elegant and simple, other test frameworks have been developed, outside the standard library. Two of the more popular ones are py.test and nose. The latter is not yet supported on Python 3, so we'll focus on py.test here.
Since py.test is not part of the standard library, you'll need to download and install it yourself; you can get it from the py.test homepage at http://pytest.org/. The website has comprehensive installation instructions...
