Question

Is there a function that is fired at the beginning/end of a scenario of tests? The functions setUp and tearDown are fired before/after every single test.

I typically would like to have this:

class TestSequenceFunctions(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUpScenario(self):
        start() #launched at the beginning, once

    def test_choice(self):
        element = random.choice(self.seq)
        self.assertTrue(element in self.seq)

    def test_sample(self):
        with self.assertRaises(ValueError):
            random.sample(self.seq, 20)
        for element in random.sample(self.seq, 5):
            self.assertTrue(element in self.seq)

    def tearDownScenario(self):
        end() #launched at the end, once

For now, these setUp and tearDown are unit tests and spread in all my scenarios (containing many tests), one is the first test, the other is the last test.

Answer 1

As of 2.7 (per the documentation) you get setUpClass and tearDownClass which execute before and after the tests in a given class are run, respectively. Alternatively, if you have a group of them in one file, you can use setUpModule and tearDownModule (documentation).

EDIT: Note that setUpClass and tearDownClass must be declared using @classmethod. Another answer to this question includes sample code.

Otherwise your best bet is probably going to be to create your own derived TestSuite and override run(). All other calls would be handled by the parent, and run would call your setup and teardown code around a call up to the parent’s run method.