Writing a test case

There are different kinds of tests. However, as a minimum, a programmer needs to know unit tests since they have to be able to write them. Unit testing checks the smallest testable part of an application. Integration testing checks whether these parts work well with each other.

The word unit is the key term here. Just test one unit at a time. Let's take a look at a simple example of a test case:

# tests.py 
from django.test import TestCase 
from django.core.urlresolvers import resolve 
from .views import HomeView 
class HomePageOpenTestCase(TestCase): 
    def test_home_page_resolves(self): 
        view = resolve('/') 
        self.assertEqual(view.func.__name__, 
                         HomeView.as_view().__name__) 

This is a simple test that checks whether the user is correctly taken to the home page view when they visit the root of our website's domain. Like most good tests, it has a long and self-descriptive name. The test simply uses Django's resolve() function to...