Can Python's unittest test in parallel, like n

Question

Python's NOSE testing framework has the concept of running multiple tests in parallel.

The purpose of this is not to test concurrency in the code, but to make tests for code that has "no side-effects, no ordering issues, and no external dependencies" run faster. The performance gain comes from concurrent I/O waits when they are accessing different devices, better use of multi CPUs/cores, and by running time.sleep() statements in parallel.

I believe the same thing could be done with Python's unittest testing framework, by having a plugin Test Runner.

Has anyone had any experience with such a beast, and can they make any recommendations?

Answer 1

You can override the unittest.TestSuite and implement some concurrency paradigm. Then, you use your customized TestSuite class just like normal unittest. In the following example, I implement my customized TestSuite class using async:

import unittest
import asyncio

class CustomTestSuite(unittest.TestSuite):
    def run(self, result, debug=False):
        """
        We override the 'run' routine to support the execution of unittest in parallel
        :param result:
        :param debug:
        :return:
        """
        topLevel = False
        if getattr(result, '_testRunEntered', False) is False:
            result._testRunEntered = topLevel = True
        asyncMethod = []
        loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
        asyncio.set_event_loop(loop)
        for index, test in enumerate(self):
            asyncMethod.append(self.startRunCase(index, test, result))
        if asyncMethod:
            loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.wait(asyncMethod))
        loop.close()
        if topLevel:
            self._tearDownPreviousClass(None, result)
            self._handleModuleTearDown(result)
            result._testRunEntered = False
        return result

    async def startRunCase(self, index, test, result):
        def _isnotsuite(test):
            "A crude way to tell apart testcases and suites with duck-typing"
            try:
                iter(test)
            except TypeError:
                return True
            return False

        loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
        if result.shouldStop:
            return False

        if _isnotsuite(test):
            self._tearDownPreviousClass(test, result)
            self._handleModuleFixture(test, result)
            self._handleClassSetUp(test, result)
            result._previousTestClass = test.__class__

            if (getattr(test.__class__, '_classSetupFailed', False) or
                    getattr(result, '_moduleSetUpFailed', False)):
                return True

        await loop.run_in_executor(None, test, result)

        if self._cleanup:
            self._removeTestAtIndex(index)

class TestStringMethods(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_upper(self):
        self.assertEqual('foo'.upper(), 'FOO')


    def test_isupper(self):
        self.assertTrue('FOO'.isupper())
        self.assertFalse('Foo'.isupper())


    def test_split(self):
        s = 'hello world'
        self.assertEqual(s.split(), ['hello', 'world'])
        # check that s.split fails when the separator is not a string
        with self.assertRaises(TypeError):
            s.split(2)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    suite = CustomTestSuite()
    suite.addTest(TestStringMethods('test_upper'))
    suite.addTest(TestStringMethods('test_isupper'))
    suite.addTest(TestStringMethods('test_split'))
    unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(suite)

In the main, I just construct my customized TestSuite class CustomTestSuite, add all the test cases, and finally run it.