Question

I’m using Python’s unittest.

I’d like to write a test that ensures a certain method completes before a certain time. I can do this by the usual calculation of the difference between timestamp after and timestamp before, but I started wondering if

1. is this commonly done in TDD, write tests that fail if a method / function is not efficient and then refactor to make it more efficient?
2. does Python’s unittest have a slick way to do this?

Answer 1

You can do it with nose @timed decorator. I use it for testing functions with timing. Example:

@timed(2.1)
def test():
    func_with_timeout(timeout=2)