I just started a small side project last week, and I finally decided to take the opportunity to really make TDD (test-driven development) happen for me using Django. Though I’ve dabbled with testing in Django and done quite a bit more with testing in Ruby, I never managed to embrace TDD fully. It’s about time, I figure.

Well, I hit some snags as I got underway. Partly this had to do with me being something of a novice when it comes to testing, and partly it has to do with the state of testing in Django at present.

My mini-gripe with testing in Django is that it’s just kind of loosey-goosey. You can use doctest, or you can use unittest. You can put your tests in your functions, or in your models, or in tests.py, or in a tests/ subfolder.

For me at least, I want my framework to be a bit more opinionated. I want a bunch of guys who are all smarter than me to have sat around and thought about (or better yet, generalized from a working production code) things like the best way to configure testing for a Python web framework, and then to tell me, in no uncertain terms, the exact way to do it.

I’m obviously exaggerating a bit, and I don’t really mean at all to rant about a phenomally awesome, not to mention open source, framework like Django. What all of the above amounts to is that I had to ponder deeply on the problem space myself and come up with a way of structuring my test code that would work for me.

So that’s what I did, and here is the organizational structure I intend to use as I proceed.

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