Testimony ¶

Topics

What is Testimony?¶

Testimony is an approach to document test cases in the Python source code using the function docstrings.

If your answer is yes to both the questions below, then Testimony is the right tool for you.

Are you using python to automate your test cases?
Are you tired of managing your test cases in a test case management tool?

Don’t worry. Testimony can help you to use your Python automation framework as a test case repository tool.

Advantages ¶

Using Testimony brings lot of advantages to your project:

Avoid using a test case management tool to document test cases by leveraging function docstrings for the same.
Enforce standards for your test case docstrings.
Run with CI tools like Travis to validate your code after every check-in.
Save a lot of time from the conventional way of writing test cases using a test management tool.
Easily extract test case information using Testimony and port it to any test management tool.

Test Case Docstring format ¶

Testimony allows you to easily configure Testimony tokens which are the defined docstring items which will be used in test case parsing.

tokens - Allowed values to be used as docstring items in your tests. Default tokens are assert, bz, feature, setup, status, steps, tags, test and type.
minimum-tokens - minimum set of tokens that are needed for each of your tests. Default minimum tokens are assert, feature and test.

Note

To help test case parsing, make sure that each test case docstring has the tokens prefixed with @ and suffixed with :. Otherwise, you may see incorrect results.

Sample Test Case ¶

A sample python test case with test case tokens is shown below:

def test_login_1(self):
    """Check if a user is able to login with valid userid and password

    More description for the test.

    @feature: Login
    @setup: Navigate to abc.com
    @steps:
        1. Launch the url
        2. Log in with valid user credentials
    @assert: Log in successful
    @bz: 1234567
    @automated: false
    """

In the above example, as you may guess - feature, setup, steps, assert, bz, automated are all tokens.

How it works?¶

To understand how Testimony works, let’s look at the help command:

$ testimony --help
  Usage: testimony [OPTIONS] REPORT [PATH]...

  Inspect and report on the Python test cases.

  Options:
  -j, --json             JSON output
  -n, --nocolor          Color output
  --tokens TEXT          Comma separated list of expected tokens
  --minimum-tokens TEXT  Comma separated list of minimum expected tokens
  --help                 Show this message and exit.

Testimony does the following to parse the test case docstrings:

It captures all Python Test modules in the path(s) provided by the PATH argument.
- As the definition implies, PATH accepts more than one value.
- If PATH is a directory, then the directory and its subdirectories will be inspected for test modules as well.
Inside each identified test module, it looks for Python Test case functions
It then parses the function docstrings and extracts their tokens. Also, it creates namespaces for module and class level docstrings which will then be reused in the children tests. For example, if a module has a token called feature, then all tests in that module will inherit it by default. But the individual tests can choose to override this value by defining their own. The token lookup will happen in the following order and it will stop on the very first match:
```
1. function level
2. class level
3. module level
```

Installation ¶

You can install Testimony from PyPI using pip:

$ pip install testimony

For easy understanding of Testimony, this repository is already included with a sample python test module tests/test_sample.py. This module contains different test case format examples. The sample commands used below also use this data.

help command ¶

See How it works? section

print command ¶

Prints a nice summary of all captured tests with the parsed tokens for each test. Also it prints non-recognized tokens.

$ testimony print tests | head -n 27

tests/test_sample.py
====================

test_positive_login_1
---------------------

Assert:
 Login is successful

Setup:
 Setup Testsample1

Steps:
 1. Login to the application with valid credentials

Tags:
 t1, t2, t3

Test:
 Login with right credentials

Unexpected tokens:
  Bug: 123456
  Feture: Login - Positive
  Statues: Manual
  Types: Functional

Note

The print command above uses the head command to show just one test case. Try without head command to see the entire output.

summary command ¶

Gives a bird’s-eye view of all the test cases in the given path. The report includes information such as:

total number of test cases.

number of test cases missing docstring.

usage of different tokens across the given project.

$ testimony summary tests/

Total number of tests:          7
Test cases with no docstrings:  1 (14.29%)
Assert:                         5 (71.43%)
Bz:                             2 (28.57%)
Feature:                        4 (57.14%)
Setup:                          6 (85.71%)
Status:                         3 (42.86%)
Steps:                          6 (85.71%)
Tags:                           4 (57.14%)
Test:                           6 (85.71%)
Type:                           1 (14.29%)

validate command ¶

Validates all the test cases in the given path. This helps ensure that all your tests have the minimal set of tokens defined. This command gives the required information which will help you identify the issues pertaining to each identified tests.

Note

To make easier integration with CI tools like travis, this command gives a non-zero return code when:

a test case is missing the docstring.

a test case is missing minimal set of tokens.

a test case has an unexpected token.

$ testimony validate tests/

tests/test_sample.py
====================

test_positive_login_1
---------------------

* Docstring should have at least assert, feature, test token(s)
* Unexpected tokens:
  Bug: 123456
  Feture: Login - Positive
  Statues: Manual
  Types: Functional

test_positive_login_2
---------------------

* Missing docstring.
* Docstring should have at least assert, feature, test token(s)

test_negative_login_5
---------------------

* Docstring should have at least assert, feature, test token(s)

Total number of tests: 7
Total number of invalid docstrings: 3 (42.86%)
Test cases with no docstrings: 1 (14.29%)
Test cases missing minimal docstrings: 3 (42.86%)
Test cases with invalid tags: 1 (14.29%)

Misc Options ¶

--json - a json output is provided when this option is specified.
--no-color - a colored output is provided by default when the termcolor package is installed. This can be disabled by specifying this option.

Project Contribution ¶

How to Contribute?¶

Fork the repository on GitHub and make your changes
Test your changes
Send a pull request
Watch for the Travis update on the PR as it runs flake8
The PR will be merged after 2 ACKs

Author ¶

This software is developed by Suresh Thirugn

Contributors ¶

Og Maciel
Corey Welton
Elyézer Rezende

Appendix ¶

Python Test Modules ¶

All files which match the following criteria:

file names start with test_
file extension matches .py

Python Test case functions ¶

Python functions whose names start with test_