Choosing Assertions Within Unittests

While Python has an assert statement, the Python unit testing framework has better assertions specialized for tests: they are more informative on failures, and do not depend on the execution’s debug mode.

Perhaps the simplest assertion is assertTrue, which can be used like this:

import unittest

class SimplisticTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_basic(self):
        self.assertTrue(1 + 1 == 2)

This will run fine, but replacing the line above with

self.assertTrue(1 + 1 == 3)

will fail.

The assertTrue assertion is quite likely the most general assertion, as anything tested can be cast as some boolean condition, but often there are better alternatives. When testing for equality, as above, it is better to write

self.assertEqual(1 + 1, 3)

When the former fails, the message is

======================================================================

FAIL: test (__main__.TruthTest)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "stuff.py", line 6, in test

    self.assertTrue(1 + 1 == 3)

AssertionError: False is not true

but when the latter fails, the message is

======================================================================

FAIL: test (__main__.TruthTest)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "stuff.py", line 6, in test

    self.assertEqual(1 + 1, 3)
AssertionError: 2 != 3

which is more informative (it actually evaluated the result of the left hand side).

You can find the list of assertions in the standard documentation. In general, it is a good idea to choose the assertion that is the most specifically fitting the condition. Thus, as shown above, for asserting that 1 + 1 == 2 it is better to use assertEqual than assertTrue. Similarly, for asserting that a is None, it is better to use assertIsNone than assertEqual.

Note also that the assertions have negative forms. Thus assertEqual has its negative counterpart assertNotEqual, and assertIsNone has its negative counterpart assertIsNotNone. Once again, using the negative counterparts when appropriate, will lead to clearer error messages.