Test-Driven Python Development

Pattern – running a subset of tests

We already saw a simple way of running a subset of tests by simply specifying the module or test class on the command line, as shown in the following:

python -m unittest stock_alerter.tests.test_stock
python -m unittest stock_alerter.tests.test_stock.StockTest

This works for the common case of when we want to run a subset based on the module. What if we want to run tests based on some other parameter? Maybe we want to run a set of basic smoke tests, or we want to run only integration tests, or we want to skip tests when running on a specific platform or Python version.

The unittest module allows us to create test suites. A test suite is a collection of test classes that are run. By default, unittest performs an ...