~vijaykumar

Chennaipy met on 27th of July. Due to some renovation work at the usual venue, Zilogic Systems, the meeting was held at IITM.

Surprisingly this time, we had a couple of people arriving before the meeting time. And gradually the participant count hit 14. Thanks to Kiran and Srini for promoting the meet in various other forums.

The meeting started with the talk on Python Month by Kiran. Kiran presented the objectives of the Python Month team. The Python Month team, was trying to pair people who had contacts in schools and colleges with people who were capable of giving talks and conducting workshops. For more details on Python Month — http://bit.ly/pythonmonth

Vijay started with the meaning of unit testing, and how different it was from integration testing. He also indicated why unit testing was important in an interpreted language like Python.

He then went on to explain how to write unit tests for a simple parser function, involving multiple branching paths. Along the way he explained the unittest Python module. He then move to a more complex function that involved talking to a MODEM over a serial port. He then showed how such real world objects can be isolated using Mock objects, for the purpose of unit testing.

Vijay then explained the various type of code coverage measurement methods, and how line coverage could be misleading. He demonstrated the usage of the Python code coverage tool coverage. He also briefed upon cyclomatic complexity, and how it can be measured using the tool radon.

He concluded the talk by discussing about the relationship between integration testing and unit testing.

After Vijay’s talk, Kiran, Mani and Balamurugan voluntered to give a talk in the next meet. And with that we came to the end of another wonderful Chennaipy meet. Hope people present had a great time.