Django Testing Presentation at DJUGL

Jan 20, 2009 · 2 minute read

The second Django User Group (DJUGL) meeting was last night and was a great success as far as I could tell. Our boardroom at work was chock full of budding Django developers and interested parties - 70 people or so in all. Good work by Rob to get everything back on track at the start of the year and the next event is already planned for the back end of February so I hear. More news soon on the mailing list hopefully.

Rather unfortunately Simon had to pull out at the last minute and I stepped in to do a quick 20 minutes or so talk on writing tests for your Django applications.

I was rather surprised that only about a third of the people coming along were using Django in some work related capacity, and when I asked who was writing tests for their code a few more hands went down. Very few of the people not using Django at work are writing tests which is unfortunate (and contrasts rather interestingly with my experiences of the Ruby community).

For a presentation done in less than a day while at work I felt it went OK. testing is a hard sell at the best of times and trying to talk to both those without experience of writing tests and at the same time trying to get in a few of the more interesting things we’ve done at work was maybe a bit of an ask.

It not being a blog post round here these days unless I include a link to GitHub I did mention a small project last night in the talk - Django Test Extensions. It’s more just a collection of useful common testing code: additional assertions, custom test runners, etc. Thanks to Ross for the last minute patch with a couple of bug fixes as well.

The other two presentations went great. Andrew talking about the South migrations system and Aral talking about real world Google App Engine were both up my street of things I’m interested in. We have video of all the talks as well so hopefully that will make it out into the wild at some point once it’s been edited.