How to turn a doctest.txt into isolated tests for better maintaince

djay · June 23, 2020, 3:16am

If you are fixing bugs in addons that have long doctests in .txt format, debugging can slower than it needs to be as these tests tend to not be isolated and you can't run just parts of the test.

I came up with a straightforward way to convert a doctest for better isolation.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/djay/c047a90622b3dae86be5d819e8dfda12

isolated_doctests.md

# How to keep your doctests and isolate them too

Let's say you have a project with a long doctest .txt file thats grown and grown.
I like doctests for their readability however they tend to encourge tacking on semi related
tests to a big txt file. Debugging now takes longer and one failing test results 
in masking other errors. This is why smaller isolated tests are good.

However you can quickly improve things.

## mytest.txt

This file has been truncated. show original