Teaching basic lab skills
for research computing

Day 8: Getting It Right

This morning's lecture was a high-level look at software testing, with a long-ish detour into exceptions; this afternoon was an introduction to Python's unittest framework, with some handwaving about testing that functions throw the right kinds of exceptions, replacing files and other slow objects with mock equivalents, and how you decide what tests to write first. It felt like it went better than yesterday's lectures on object-oriented programming, which I think left some students a little bewildered. We're spending tomorrow looking at databases, which means I have to brush up on my SQL tonight...