A good part of a developer's work is to test and debug code. Automated tests are an inestimable tool to build and maintain robust software. In this chapter, we will learn how to add automated tests to our addon modules, to make them more robust. Server side debugging techniques are also presented, allowing the developer to inspect and understand what is happening in his code.
Automated tests are generally accepted as a best practice in software. It does not only help us ensure our code is correctly implemented. More importantly, it provides a safety net for future code enhancements or rewrites.
In the case of dynamic programming languages, such as Python, since there is no compilation step, syntax errors can go unnoticed. This makes it even more important to have unit tests going through as many lines of code as possible.
The two goals described can provide a guiding light when writing tests. The first goal for your tests should be to provide a good test coverage, designing test cases that go through all lines of code. This alone will usually make good progress on the second goal - to show the functional correctness of the code.
This alone will usually make good progress on the second goal - to show the functional correctness of the code, since after this we will surely have a great starting point to build additional test cases for non obvious use cases.