Other unit testing tools

In this chapter, we have exclusively used the built-in unittest framework for writing the tests. There are several other tools available for unit testing that were not discussed. The purpose of this section is only to introduce you to the other unit testing tools available out there besides the built-in unittest module. For instance, there are tools such as nose or pytest that make it easier to write the unit tests to a large extent. Let's briefly review some of these unit testing tools.

Doctest

This is a built-in module, which looks for text that resembles Python code written in an interpreter. Here is a trivial example that shows a docstring with an example usage of the function:

def add_nums(a, b): 
    """Return sum of two numbers 

    Example usage: 
    .. doctest:: 

    >>> add_nums(10, 20) 
    30 
    """ 
    return (a + b)

Doctest identifies such code, and runs it to check if it really does what it says. This is quite an effective way to verify...