How to write unit tests using the Eclipse PyDev IDE

In the previous recipe, we started to use Python's unit testing capabilities, and in this recipe, we will ensure the quality of our GUI code by further using this capability.

We will unit test our GUI in order to make sure that the internationalized strings our GUI displays are as expected.

In the previous recipe, we encountered some bugs in our unit testing code but, typically, our unit tests will find regression bugs that are caused by modifying existing application code, not the unit test code. Once we have verified that our unit testing code is correct, we do not usually change it.

Note

Our unit tests also serve as documentation of what we expect our code to do.

By default, Python's unit tests are executed with a textural unit test runner and we can run this in the PyDev plug-in from within the Eclipse IDE. We can also run the very same unit tests from a console window.

In addition to the text runner in this recipe, we will explore...