Creating robust GUIs using unit tests

Python comes with a built-in unit testing framework and, in this recipe, we will start using this framework to test our Python GUI code.

Before we start writing unit tests, we want to design our testing strategy. We could easily intermix the unit tests with the code they are testing but a better strategy is to separate the application code from the unit test code.

Note

PyUnit has been designed according to the principles of all the other xUnit testing Frameworks.

Getting ready

We will test the internationalized GUI we created earlier in this chapter.

How to do it…

In order to use Python's built-in unit testing framework, we have to import the Python unittest module. Let's create a new module and name it UnitTests.py.

We first import the unittest module, then we create our own class and, within this class, we inherit and extend the unittest.TestCase class.

The simplest code to do it looks as follows:

import unittest 

class GuiUnitTests(unittest.TestCase): 
  ...