I am using the unittest framework to automate integration tests of multi-threaded python code, external hardware and embedded C. Despite my blatant abuse of a unittesting framework for integration testing, it works really well. Except for one problem: I need the test to fail if an exception is raised from any of the spawned threads. Is this possible with the unittest framework?
A simple but non-workable solution would be to either a) refactor the code to avoid multi-threading or b) test each thread separately. I cannot do that because the code interacts asynchronously with the external hardware. I have also considered implementing some kind of message passing to forward the exceptions to the main unittest thread. This would require significant testing-related changes to the code being tested, and I want to avoid that.
Time for an example. Can I modify the test script below to fail on the exception raised in my_thread without modifying the x.ExceptionRaiser class?
import unittest
import x
class Test(unittest.TestCase):
def test_x(self):
my_thread = x.ExceptionRaiser()
# Test case should fail when thread is started and raises
# an exception.
my_thread.start()
my_thread.join()
if __name__ == '__main__':
unittest.main()