Wednesday 15 June 2011
Here’s a true story from the #python IRC channel, a frequently-asked question played out for real. I’m nedbat, the other nick has been changed to protect the innocent:
other: there’s no way to automagically omit coveraging the actual test modules is there?
nedbat: you can add an omit line to the .coveragerc, but I’ve found useful info from coverage on my tests.
other: What kind of useful info?
nedbat: useful info: two test methods with the same name (by accident) so one was never called.
other: hah oh boy, one of the test modules I was ignoring sure enough was a test that wasn’t being run :). Perhaps I better not, I hadn’t thought of that before.
nedbat: yay coverage! :)
other: yay coverage!
Moral of the story: if you have enough tests to run coverage, then your tests are a serious part of your product. You should run coverage on them, it will help.
Comments
It's also useful for test suites that don't have automatic test discovery (e.g. Python's own regrtest): if you add a test, but forget to add the incantation to invoke it, it will show up in your test coverage data.
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