25.3. unittest — Unit testing framework

Abstraction: Python's built-in xUnit testing framework API and concepts

Key points:

• Core concepts: test case (single scenario), test fixture (setUp/tearDown setup code), test suite (collection), test runner (executor)
• Tests are methods named with test_ prefix inside TestCase subclasses; assertEqual, assertTrue, assertRaises are the main assertion methods
• Test discovery (Python 2.7+): python -m unittest discover recursively finds test*.py files from a start directory
• Decorators @skip, @skipIf, @skipUnless, @expectedFailure control conditional test execution without removing tests
• setUpClass/tearDownClass (class-level) and setUpModule/tearDownModule (module-level) fixtures avoid redundant setup when many tests share state

Connections: Python · Unit Testing · Software Testing · Test Driven Development

Source: http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html