Do TDD nicer with PyCharm

When developing software with the TDD method, you should run tests again and again. it will become tedious sometimes and, also you maybe forget to run a final test before commit and push. there are some automation methods to do it automatically. for example, I used git hook in PyCharm and write some small scripts to run tests before commit.

After some time I found a very useful plugin named pycrunch that automates my tests running in a very beautiful way. it is a very brief introduction to it.

Features

there is a little demo of pycrunch in action:

• show successful/failed tests

• show code coverage status and show what tests will cover the line

• show each test output

• application state tracing

start using it

• this plugin is based on a python library named: pycrunch-engine. you first should install it:

pip install pycrunch-engine

• install PyCharm plugin:

• create pycrunch config file (if it was not created):

.pycrunch-config.yaml

• fill out the pycrunch config file based on your requirements. for example, if you are using pytest, use a configuration like this:

# documentation https://pycrunch.com/docs/configuration-file
engine:
    runtime: pytest

• start test daemon

• the tests will run on every save (ctrl + s) or save action that is automatically done by PyCharm.

Recommendation

• because all tests related to a test file will run on file save the event and it time-consuming if there were many tests on it, better to separate tests to multiple files.