When comparing unittest vs ward, the Slant community recommends ward for most people. In the question“What are the best Python unit testing frameworks?” ward is ranked 4th while unittest is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose ward is:
Fixtures can await asynchronous code.
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Pros
Pro Part of the Python standard library
PyUnit has been a part of the Python standard library since version 2.1 as the unittest module. This makes it widely available to developers without the need to install additional modules since it's coming out of the box with Python.
Pro Flexible test case execution
The way tests are run is through:
if name == 'main':
unittest.main()
Then unittest.main()
builds a TestSuite
object that contains all the tests that have method names starting with "test", then a TextTestRunner
which then executes each method and prints the results.
But individual test cases can be executed simply by specifying their names on the terminal:
python unittest_program.py testProgram.testGetFeedPostingHost
The default output is usually pretty concise, but it can be more verbose simply by adding a -v
flag in the end when calling the test from the command line.
So unittest can be considered pretty flexible when it comes to test case execution.
Pro Promotes grouping related tests into common test suites
Pro Very fast test collection
Pro Easy to use for people who are comfortable with testing in other languages
Since pyUnit is a derivative of xUnit and it's quite similar to other xUnit frameworks, it's quite easy for people with not much Python background to relate to.
Pro Very precise test duration reports
Unittest reports tests duration in milliseconds
Pro Async fixtures
Fixtures can await asynchronous code.
Pro Explicit fixtures
Test fixtures are referenced explicitly, which helps both humans and IDE's understand which fixture is used.
Pro Encourages better test names
Tests are named by markdown strings, not the function name of the test.
Cons
Con camelCase naming
Idiomatic python code uses snake_case, but this was ported so closely from JUnit that it has retained java-style camelCase method names. That can be jarring.
Con No color output
Con The API can make the test code's intent hard to understand
Although unittest does not have a huge API that needs to be remembered, it has too much support for abstraction, this makes the test code intent's unclear.
Con Verbose
Too much boilerplate code is needed.
Con Not many plugins available (in 2022)
While ward has a plugin system, there are not many plugins available as of 2022. Alternatives, like pytest, have many more plugins to choose from.
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