stability 0.0.4

A package for managing stability tests

Stability

This package provides the @stability_test decorator, which can be used to easily manage stability tests.

Background

We often want to wrap our code in what I would call "stability tests".

These tests ensure that nothing has changed about the function(s) being tested, and often look something like this:

def test_some_func_stability():
    out = some_func()
    expected = pd.DataFrame([[1, 2.2], [3, 4.4]])
    pd.testing.assert_frame_equal(out, expected)

But updating tests like this can be time consuming - if the output of a function has changed, we will have to

• add a print statement to our test
• copy the new output values
• paste them into our test as the new expected values

This can be a pain, even more so if multiple tests need updating.

A better way

The @stability_test decorator aims to take all the effort out of managing stability tests, and also makes their implementation quicker and neater. The example test shown above would simply become:

@stability_test
def test_some_func_stability():
    return some_func()

A few notes:

• the test now simply returns the output to be checked
• the @stability_test decorator takes care of checking the output vs the expected values

How does the library know what the expected values are?

The first time you create a stability test with @stability_test you simply pass in write=True.

@stability_test(write=True)
def test_some_func_stability():
    return some_func()

When you run the test with write=True, the output will be saved to a CSV file, in a resources sub-folder in the same folder as the test file.

Once this CSV is written, it becomes the expected output of the test, and whenever the test runs in future the decorator will automatically compare the test's output (return value) against the contents of the CSV

You can add the CSV file to your repository, and the expected output of the test is then stored in a clean human-readable format. Any future changes in the output of the function will be clearly visible in the diff on the CSV file. And it only takes adding write=True and re-running the test to upate the values in the CSV - no adding print statements, copying and pasting.

NOTE: Remember to remove write=True once the CSV file has been written or updated - otherwise your unit tests are not running as intended - they will be constantly re-saving new data when they run rather than comparing against the intended expected values.

Checking multiple outputs in the same test

The decorator can also be used to check values which are yielded from a test set up as a generator function. For example:

@stability_test
def test_some_func_stability_two_cases():
    yield some_func(1, 'a')
    yield some_func(2, 'b')

This test will compare the outputs of each function call to the contents of an associated CSV file. Both files can be updated at once by running the test with write=True, as discussed above.

Updating outputs for multiple tests at once

The decorator is most useful when updating multiple expected values (across multiple tests). Rather than repeating the work of adding write=True to each test individually, you can set the environment variable

STABILITY_WRITE_DATA=1

Then run any tests for which you want to update expected values. The decorator will take care of the rest - all expected output CSVs will be updated. You just need to add/commit the changed CSV files to git or whichever VCS you are using.