Overview

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Successful developers need to not only build the right software but build it right. To know your software works correctly, you need to test each unit of code. One of the best methods for this unit-level testing is test driven development. This course provides a detailed overview of test driven development (TDD). First, you’ll learn what automated testing is and why it is essential for building robust applications resilient to failure. You’ll explore the basics of testing, including test cases, testing levels, and the traditional release cycle. You’ll learn about TDD and its complement, behavior driven development (BDD): TDD tests individual units of code while BDD tests how these units work together. Then you’ll examine TDD in detail. You’ll explore TDD’s benefits, concepts, and popular tools, and you’ll hone your new testing skills through hands-on labs. You’ll create TDD test cases by writing test assertions and building test fixtures, and you’ll run these test cases by using the Nose testing package. You’ll then practice more advanced TDD methods such as increasing code coverage, generating and using fake data, and testing mock objects.

Syllabus

Introduction to Testing

This module provides an overview of software testing. You will learn about the importance of testing through an example: the development of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module’s guidance system. You will discover the numerous problems that occur when developers do not test their code. Then you will explore the four levels of testing and find out when each appears in the traditional release cycle. You will learn what test driven and behavior driven development are and why both are essential for effective testing. You will discover the purpose of test cases and witness their value through a demonstration.

Test Driven Development

This module provides an overview of Test-Driven Development (TDD). You will learn what TDD is and discover the three basic steps in the TDD and Red/Green/Refactor workflow. You will see why TDD is essential for DevOps and all automated testing. You will also discover popular testing tools for TDD and closely examine the features of several tools for Python. This module also covers essential methods for performing TDD. You will explore ways to run TDD tests such as, Python’s built-in test runner, Unittest, and the more feature-rich module, Nose. You will learn about assertions and how to use them to test code. You will discover why you must include happy and sad paths in your test module. You will also discover the test fixtures and how to use them to establish an appropriate initial state for each test.

Advanced Methods for Test Driven Development

This module covers advanced methods for TDD. You will learn about test coverage: why it’s important, how to increase it by using test coverage reports, and why you should keep testing even at full test coverage. You will discover the value of testing against fake data and how to use factories to generate this data. You will also explore mocking, a process for mimicking the behavior of real objects, and you will find out the testing situations for which mocking is useful. You will learn how to use two common methods for mocking: patching a function call and mocking entire objects.

Final Project and Final Exam

In this final module, you will work on a Final project. You will apply many of the technologies and concepts you've learned in the course and will create a microservice for a product catalog backend to an eCommerce application. The UI of the eCommerce application will be used by administrators to maintain the product catalog. This Final Project is divided into two parts. In the first part of this project, you will use good Test Driven Development practices to create a REST API that allows users to Create, Read, Update, Delete, and List products by various attributes. In the second part of this project, you will write Behavior Driven Development scenarios to test that the administrative user interface that has been provided for you behaves as expected. Finally, you will also attempt a final exam to test the concepts learned.