The next Byte-sized RSE session, covering property-based testing, will take place this Friday, 19 April, 13:00-14:30 BST/GMT+1.

Now in its second series, Byte-sized RSE are short interactive tutorial sessions where you can learn key skills to improve how you write and manage your research software.

This session will look Property-based Testing using Python. This is a form of automated testing that applies a range of values to key properties to try and identify failure cases in your code. For a much more detailed discussion of what property based testing is (and isn’t!), take a look at this article.

The session will provide a general introduction to the topic followed by an interactive tutorial where you’ll have a chance to try out writing your own tests. Please note that to participate in the interactive part of the session, you’ll need Python installed on your computer and be able to install new Python libraries with the pip package management tool. We’ll do this via a virtual environment so you won’t require admin access if you have Python, pip and venv available. We also recommend that you some basic familiarity with writing tests in Python via Python’s unittest framework, pytest or a similar testing library. You’ll also need to have Git installed since we’ll be cloning an example repository from GitHub which will contain some initial content for the interactive exercises.

Why not join us, and tell your colleagues too!