Tutorial at PyCon 2006

Titus and I will be giving a tutorial at PyCon 2006: "Agile development and testing in Python". The tutorial will happen only if there will be enough interest -- so if you're planning on going to PyCon next year, I urge you to sign up :-) It will be on Thursday Feb. 23rd, on the day before the conference starts. It should be a fun and interactive 3 hours.

Here is the outline we have so far. If you're interested in other topics related to agile methodologies applied to a Python project, please leave a comment.

Agile development and testing in Python

We will present a Python application that we developed together as an "agile team", using agile development and testing approaches, techniques and tools. The value of the tutorial will consist on one hand in detailing the development and testing methodologies we used, and on the other hand in demonstrating specific Python tools that we used for our development and testing. We will cover TDD, unit testing, code coverage, functional/acceptance testing, Web application testing, continuous integration, source code management, issue tracking, project management, documentation, Python package management.

Presentation outline

1st hour:

• Intro: agile development and testing concepts

• Source control management (subversion) and issue tracking/project management (Trac)

• TDD/unit testing (py.test, doctest, nose, TestOOB)

• unit tests as documentation (doctest and epydoc)

2nd hour:

• code coverage (the coverage module)

• source code analysis (pylint, pyflakes)

• acceptance/functional testing (PyFit/FitNesse, TextTest)

• performance testing (FunkLoad, twill)

3rd hour:

• Web application testing with Selenium and twill

• Scripting Selenium tests using a Twisted-based server

• Python package management (distutils, setuptools, Cheesecake index)

• Continuous integration and 'smoke test' (buildbot)