On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:26:20 +0000, Alister wrote: > On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:59:05 -0800, Nick Mellor wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I've got a unit test that will usually succeed but sometimes fails. An >> occasional failure is expected and fine. It's failing all the time I >> want to test for. >> >> What I want to test is "on average, there are the same number of males >> and females in a sample, give or take 2%." [...]
> unit test are for testing your code, not checking if input data is in > the correct range so unless you are writing a program intended to > generate test data I don't see why unit test are appropriate in this > case. I don't believe Nick is using unittest to check input data. As I understand it, Nick has a program which generates random values. If his program works correctly, it should generate approximately equal numbers of "male" and "female" values. So he writes a unit test to check that the numbers are roughly equal. This is an appropriate test, although as I already suggested earlier, unit tests are not well suited for non-deterministic testing. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list