[TIP] Testing specific code

[Matt Harrison]

Folks-

I've been messing around more with pyconverage.el[0] and have
'flymake-mode' enabled it.  (For non-emacites, flymake-mode invokes a
callback during save/editing to highlight borked code).  So if you
enable flymake-mode to show coverage data it will try and find a
.coverage file and report on missing lines in your code.

There's somewhat of a impedance mismatch between coverage code and
flymake-mode, in that once you edit a file, there's no guarantees
about line numbers matching up.  As an idea to help deal with that and
to help focus coverage attention on specific code points, I thought of
an idea.  (I'm assuming others here have probably thought of it before
to).  What I'd like to do is have a (emacs) command that says 'run
tests for this function/method'.  Then something
(nose??/plugin??/emacs??) goes and finds tests that invoke that method
and only runs those tests and reports coverage for them.  A naive
implementation would be a simple regex match for the function name and
then look to see if it resides in a test.  That way you can edit your
codes and your tests and quickly retrieve relevant coverage
information.  Does this make sense?

So before I go off and implement this I thought I'd ask if it already
exists.  I can't find it.  Also feedback is good.   Is there a better
method/workflow?  I'd imagine other's might find such functionality
useful even without coverage information.  ie when you are looking
at/developing tests for code that is new to you.  I would think a nose
plugin would work best...

cheers,

-matt

0 - http://panela.blog-city.com/ann_pycoverageel.htm