"I know I should write tests, but ...

• ... they take time to write
• ... I’m a good developer
• ... my customer / the community does the testing"

Sound familiar? No matter how good you think you are, you will make mistakes. Your code will contain bugs and someone will come after you demanding an explanation. Without some methodical way of testing, you are guaranteeing your code with nothing more than guesswork and arrogance. Clicking around the Plone interface for a few minutes before you ship your code off to the customer or user is simply not enough.

Testing is an art, it needs to be built into your development cycle from the very beginning - it is not something you do only after all the other work is finished, it is something you do continuously. Unfortunately, testing often evokes emotions of dread in developers. It's slow, it's boring, it's not what they signed up to do. But the art of testing has evolved beyond that - there is considerable elegance and fun to be found in well-conceived test strategies.

This tutorial aims to give you the tools you need to write tests and testable software in Plone. If you are writing software for Plone core itself, don't even think about commiting any bug fix or feature without test coverage. If you are writing an add-on product or doing a customisation, holding yourself to the same high standards that the Plone core team do will give you better confidence in your software and will likely save you considerable pain down the road.

Examples

This tutorial contains several examples of the various types of tests. They are available in the example.tests package, which you can install as a develop egg in a Plone 3 buildout. The examples of running tests use the standard commands for buildouts, since this is the only way that works reliably on Windows (that is, plain zopectl test will not work on Windows).

Take a look at the buildout tutorial for more information.