CodeSOD: Abstract Test Case

A great many breakfast cereals promise some sort of health benefit. This brand is good for your heart, that brand has 11 essential vitamins and minerals. This one's got bran! Just because there's a promise of health benefits doesn't mean they actually exist- most of these cereals are lightly fluffed sugar held together with a smidge of starch.

Object-oriented languages promise a lot of code-health benefits, and used properly, they can certainly deliver. In this somewhat tortured metaphor, the Lucky Charms marshmallow of OO features is Inheritance. It's tasty, it's easy to explain, but it's not really good for your code. A little bit, here-and-there, from time-to-time is great. But some folks buy the three pound bag and that's just not good for anybody.

Daniel took over some code left behind by a retiring co-worker. The code was seeded through with abstract classes- though, because this was Python, "abstract" was more of a convention than a statement of fact. This predecessor took abstraction to its "logical" conclusion, and when testing abstract classes, they wrote abstract tests:

class TestAbstractDriver(unittest.TestCase): """Test case docstring.""" def test_name(self): pass # for those not familiar with Python, # "pass" is how you write a method with no implementation

This code was followed by AbstractDriverTest, which inherited from TestAbstractDriver and actually implemented the test.

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