Comparisons

How does marbles compare to other Python testing tools?

Marbles extends Python’s built-in unittest library, so some of what distinguishes marbles from other testing tools isn’t about marbles as much as it’s about unittest. That being said, marbles extends unittest —as opposed to another Python testing tool—for a reason.

In this section, we’ll call out differentiating features of marbles specifically, as well as differentiating features of unittest that make unittest the right foundation for marbles.

For now, we focus on pytest, which is widely used and whose failure messages have the most in common with marbles failure messages.

pytest

As far as failure messages go, marbles has the most in common with pytest. However, because marbles is built on top of unittest, writing marbles tests is pretty different than writing pytest tests.

Marbles is all about the test consumer, while pytest is all about the test author. Pytest tries to make you more efficient while writing tests and marbles tries to make you more efficient while reading, reasoning about, and responding to test failures. You could say (and we sometimes do) that pytest is write optimized and marbles is read optimized.

If you’re familiar with pytest, you’ll probably find that writing marbles tests is more typing than you’re used to, but we hope, no matter which tool you know well, responding to test failures will be faster and easier with marbles. Marbles achieves this in a couple of ways:

  1. Marbles failures expose more information than pytest failures

  2. Giving test authors the ability to curate what appears in the failure message encourages them to design their tests with the test consumer in mind

  3. Unittest tests are more explicit than pytest tests, meaning it’s easier to determine and reason about what tests are doing

Similarities

Assertion Source

Both marbles and pytest present the source code of the whole assertion statement that failed, which is more useful than a typical Python traceback.

We believe both tools provide an equivalent benefit here.

Local Variables

Both marbles and pytest present some of the local variables present at the time an assertion in your test failed.

Pytest exposes only the variables that are involved in the assertion (and shows each sub-expression involved in the assertion). Marbles exposes any public variables that are in scope at the time the assertion failed, whether or not they are directly involved in the assertion.

Advantages of marbles

Note annotations

Marbles allows test authors to annotate assertion statements with additional information about the test and the author’s intent that will help the test consumer put the failed assertion in context.

Explicit assertion names

Pytest relies on the bare assert keyword, and encourages use of it directly. This puts the burden on the test consumer to derive the author’s intent. As a consumer, you need to parse the logic of the assertion condition and read the rest of the test to understand what’s going on.

Instead of the assert keyword, marbles tests use the assertion methods provided by unittest. Unittest’s assertions methods have semantically-rich names that help convey the author’s intent to the test consumer in almost-plain English. We believe that, because the assertion statement that failed will be exposed in the failure message, is is worthwhile to write assertion statements that are as descriptive and easy to understand as possible.

Furthermore, relying on the assert keyword makes it difficult to ensure that similar expectations are being asserted in comparable ways. Having a standard set of specific assertion methods helps ensure that similar assertions are made in the same way. For example, every test that uses the assertRegex() assertion will test for a regex match in the same way.

The marbles.mixins package provides even more and semantically-richer assertion methods on top of the standard set of unittest assertions. You are also free to write your own assertion methods. The marbles.mixins provide a good template for building out a set of custom assertions that may be unique to your business or use case.

Local variable control

Both marbles and pytest expose some of the test’s local “state”. Pytest failure messages include any variables included in the assertion statement, and will expand any complex expressions that are present in the assertion. Any variables that are not used in the assertion will not be displayed, meaning we don’t see any variables that may have been defined leading up to the assertion.

For example, consider the following pytest code:

assert a * b < c * d

If this assertion fails, pytest will show you the values of the expressions a * b and c * d, as well as the individual values of each variable a, b, c, and d.

Marbles will display any public local variables defined within the test at the time it failed, regardless of whether or not they were used in the failing assertion.

Consider the same example as above written in marbles:

self.assertLess(a * b, c * d)

If this assertion fails, marbles will show you the values of a, b, c, and d, but not the values of the expressions a * b or c * d. If it’s valuable for the test consumer to also see the values of these expressions, we can achieve that by assigning them to variables:

lhs = a * b
rhs = c * d
self.assertLess(lhs, rhs)

If we want to exclude any local variables from the failure message, all we need to do is give them “internal” or “private” names, i.e., prefix the variable names with an underscore.

This gives the test author natural—and pretty neutral—control over what local variables will be displayed in the failure message. In pytest, in order for locals to appear in the failure message they need to be used in the assertion. In marbles, they need only be public.

Pure extension of unittest

While pytest gives you lots of power to be clever with fixtures when writing tests, this is often at the expense of being able to easily understand what any given test is doing when you’re trying to debug a failure.

It can be hard to piece together where fixtures come from: they might not even be in the same file, or any that are imported. Even if you can find the fixtures, it’s unclear exactly what the control flow is. This gets particularly complicated if the author used conftest.py anywhere in the project.

Marbles works with unmodified unittest tests. We find unittest tests have a clearer structure than pytest tests, especially those with complicated fixtures. With unittest, control flow is explicit, as long as you understand basic Python semantics. There’s no magic, it’s just inheritance.

We have found that, at scale, unittest’s boilerplate is a benefit rather than a burden. It makes for tests that are more explicit about what they’re doing, and it encourages logical grouping of tests, both of which reduce the test consumer’s time to understand a failure.