Unit testing software: nose, nose2, pytest

This is post for discussion over whether it might be beneficial to switch from nose to another unit testing software.

• QuTiP is using nose for unit testing. A disclaimer on that project homepage warns that nose might not be maintained in the future.

• nose2 is the successor to nose. It is actively maintained. There are some differences.

• pytest is another open-source solution. By comparing nose2 and pytest activity it seems that the latter has grown and is actively updated.

I wonder whether it would make sense to migrate to a more popular (possibly more robust?) software and how much work this would mean. Other implications are not clear to me at this moment.

[goerz]

I’ve found pytest to be extremely nice to work with. One advantage is that pytest will also pick up and run nose tests, so there is no need to rewrite all of the existing tests. At the same time, new tests will be easier to write, as pytest has much less boilerplate code than nose.

[ajgpitch]

I think we should swap, but I don’t think it’s necassarily high priority.

My reckoning is that nose2 could be easier to switch to than pytest. I don’t think that anything we do is particularly special. It might be a case of suck it and see.