Steve Purcell added the comment: Hi Brian - thanks for going into some details of your rationale!
You might be surprised to hear that it's indeed possible to make all of your unit tests mutually independent; check out the area of 'mock objects'. It turns out to be possible, and indeed desirable once the "zen" of the technique clicks, to test every class in isolation without referring to other neighbouring classes. I was surprised by the enormous effectiveness of this somewhat hardcore technique when I was forced into it by working with one of the original Mock Object paper authors. Having already spent years coaching developers in XP techniques, I thought I was already a testing whiz. In most real-world cases, though, a class under test will be tested using its interaction with other separately-tested classes in the system, and the associated unit tests therefore bear some relation to one another. It's usually not helpful to divide those classes into layers that can be tested in order from the lowest layer to the highest, because classes tend to form clumps rather than layers. When a big suite of tests is run, failures therefore form clumps too, and often the underlying programming error is easier to see by looking at the clump rather than just the first failure. I think this explains why most people get by without an option like '-o'. Of course, it often makes sense to have separate test suites for different areas of the system under test so that they can be run in isolation. Rather than relying on test naming, you might consider explicitly building TestSuites that run your test cases in the desired order. As for preparing an updated patch, I'll get to it if I get a few minutes. All the best from this Brit in Germany. __________________________________ Tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue2241> __________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com