Where do your unit tests live? Does is vary, depending on project size? Do you like a flat structure, with test files living alongside everything else? Are you a nested folders person?
I’m curious the practice of others, because I still don’t feel like I’ve found a testing directory structure that satisfies me.
For unit tests I usually have a test/ folder next to my src/ folder, that duplicates the folder structure. My brain prefers things being seperate from eachother (resources, source code per language, tests) and this is afaik the only way that you can keep it consistent between different languages (C# for example needs a seperate unit test project)
In Rust, the tests usually sit right next to the source code, even in the same file. That’s partly because the compiler can just strip the tests from the final binary, and I assume partly just conventional. In Python, you usually want to keep the tests out of the final sdist/wheel, so the setup you described is probably the most common in bigger projects.
In production!
I kid I kid.
For unit tests, I put them within a folder parallel to the source code. The directory in that folder matches the module hierarchy.
A flat structure can work for extremely small projects, but things start to go sideways as the code base grows.
Putting the test files alongside the source files makes it harder work with from a project management perspective:
pytesthas to check more files when doing discovery, which makes the tests take longer- It is significantly harder to configure
mypyto a more lenient set of rules for test code. - It is harder to package/deploy only the runtime code
If the project is big enough to have integration tests, I prefer to have those in their own folder like the unit test folder. It is possible to mark tests into different categories, but putting them in a dedicated folder makes it is harder for people to forget to mark an integration test.
My projects are usually laid out like this at work:
src/ — module_1/ — some_file.py test/ — module_1/ — some_file_test.pyI just copy the Java dev structure for this.
Which is basically just a reflection of directories. Someone else mentioned it here.
Tests?
