13.2. Diving in

Now that you've completely defined the behavior you expect from your conversion functions, you're going to do something a little unexpected: you're going to write a test suite that puts these functions through their paces and makes sure that they behave the way you want them to. You read that right: you're going to write code that tests code that you haven't written yet.

This is called unit testing, since the set of two conversion functions can be written and tested as a unit, separate from any larger program they may become part of later. Python has a framework for unit testing, the appropriately-named unittest module.

Note
unittest is included with Python 2.1 and later. Python 2.0 users can download it from pyunit.sourceforge.net.

Unit testing is an important part of an overall testing-centric development strategy. If you write unit tests, it is important to write them early (preferably before writing the code that they test), and to keep them updated as code and requirements change. Unit testing is not a replacement for higher-level functional or system testing, but it is important in all phases of development: