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Written by Pamela Fox on 2024-12-06 at 23:02

I had a lot of tricky tests to write today that needed mocks against an async SDK.

To get started, I tried out GitHub Copilot "generate tests".

Observations:

• Copilot really liked using MagicMock, whereas I generally construct the actual class and use monkeypatch.setattr to mock the methods used.
• Copilot's tests did often pass, after a few tweaks.
• When a test didn't pass, I found it harder to debug MagicMock mocks, because they mocked too much- I wasn't getting errors for undefined attrs.

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Written by Pamela Fox on 2024-12-06 at 23:03

So I eventually modified most tests to "my style" with monkeypatch.setattr whenever possible.

I'm still grateful for Copilot's help since:

1. I've now learnt more about how to use MagicMock, for when I need it

2. sometimes it's less intimidating to edit an existing failed test than to write a brand new one

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Written by Pamela Fox on 2024-12-06 at 23:03

I'm curious what style mocks y'all prefer! should i be magic mocking more??

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Toot

Written by Josh Rivers on 2024-12-07 at 18:16

@pamelafox I’ve done a lot of mocking in Python and other langs and I am changing my practice. Beyond specific types of fault injection or obscure branch behavior checks, I want to be using fakes. A lot of rework in my past could have been avoided if I wrote my tests as integration tests against multiple modules rather than unit tests a function at a time. I am now trying to enable that through accurate behavior fakes at the right levels of my applications so the tests work against a “real” flow of the code (like using moto instead of MagicMock). The Google SDEV handbook has a good section on testing that speaks to this philosophy (it’s a little over-declarative and chest thumping, and written for a Java shop, but the discussion has a lot of insights)

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