Testing Notes

Unit Testing vs. Integration Testing

• Unit Testing: Tests individual components (e.g. functions, helper methods) in isolation. External dependencies (like databases or APIs) are mocked.
• Integration Testing: Tests how different parts of the system work together (e.g. hitting an endpoint to ensure it writes to a test database and returns the correct response).

pytest best practices

• Use fixtures (@pytest.fixture) for setup and teardown logic (e.g., creating and rolling back database sessions).
• Keep tests fast by using in-memory databases (sqlite) or a separate Postgres test database that gets cleaned/re-seeded before each test.
• Use pytest-cov to measure and monitor code coverage.