Colorful Test documentation

Colorful Test is a unit testing framework that is similar to and inspired by Python’s unittest. What makes Colorful Test cool and different is that it’s uniquely designed for educational settings while also supporting general-purpose use. It displays error messages in a colorful and more helpful way, and success messages in a way that makes students proud of their work.

It also guides students through their projects by failing fast (by default) and showing them exactly what went wrong. unittest doesn’t give you much freedom when it comes to the order of test execution, but this is so important for student projects that, with Colorful Test, you can just append a number at the end of the test name to determine the order.

We also provide a grade/score feature (optional) that makes it easy to grade student projects. The run method returns a TestResults object that lets you customize how the output looks, giving you more control.

If you’re familiar with unittest, it shouldn’t be hard to get a grasp of how Colorful Test works, and you can skip to Usage.

Contents:

• Usage
  • Installation
  • Basic Example
  • Command Line Interface
  • Organizing your code
  • Skipping tests
    • skip_test()
    • skip_test_if()
    • skip_test_unless()
  • Classes and functions
    • TestCase
    • Message
• Tutorial: A simple Calculator program
  • Getting started
  • Calculator program
    • The test runner
    • TestCase assert_* methods
    • Colorful messages
    • Fail fast
    • Ordering test methods
  • Conclusion
• API
  • colorful_test
    • colorful_test.exceptions
    • colorful_test.message
    • colorful_test.skip_test
    • colorful_test.testcase
  • colorful_test.testcase.TestCase
    • TestCase
  • colorful_test.message.show_message
    • show_message()