[Pyunit-interest] intro & Questions

[Bill B. <bb...@co...>]

Hey!

	My company is in the business of building software systems  
primarily targeted to using HTTP as the deployment "window".  I.e. we  
build web sites that require complex infrastructure / moving parts.   
 As we heavily embrace XP practices and understand the value of  
testing, I have been tasked with building tools to aid in the testing  
of web based software.

	While it is trivial to use PyUnit to trigger, say, JUnit  
based tests internal to the application or applications, that doesn't  
provide the level of testing that I need.  In particular, it doesn't  
test user level interaction with the site via HTTP.

	I have a relativley crude set of tools written against  
PyUnit that allow one to test form interaction or a series of  
request/responses where each request/response requires state from the  
previous r/r.   This raised two questions:

	- PyUnit doesn't seem to maintain state between test runs.   
I.e. if I have a TestCase subclass with 10 test cases, that results  
in 10 individual instances of the TestCase subclass.  However, I need  
to maintain state across tests-- session identifiers and the other  
wonderful fallout from apps deployed against the web.   I can't  
imagine this is a new problem and, while my solution works, I'm  
curious what others have done and if there is some kind of a  
"standard" pattern.

	- What are people doing to automate the run of tests?  If I  
have a bunch of different python scripts in a directory-- each  
implementing a test suite-- what is the best way to run everything in  
the directory?

	- The examples didn't really cover spewing stuff to  
stdout/stderr during the run.   I don't forsee any particularly nasty  
problems in doing so, but-- again-- am looking to a more experienced  
community to provide some guidance.

	Any other suggestions?

	thanks-- very cool stuff!  It has already saved me hours of  
potentially very stupid debugging....

	b.bum