Publishing Django Test Coverage Reports in Jenkins

This post is built on some assumptions.

First, I assume that you already know that writing unit tests is good for you. Well, to be honest, if you are not systematically writing tests for your code, you shouldn’t be calling yourself a software engineer anyway. No excuses.

In consequence I also assume that your latest Django project includes its dose of unit testing. But do you have a clear idea of which parts of your Django site are not being tested? Are you taking action to improve on that area? In other words, are you already obtaining and analysing coverage data for your project?

If so, lucky you. I didn’t, decided it was about time, and set out to the task.

I will try to demistify the process, since it takes very little effort and you can reap substantial benefits from it – provided, of course, that you take a look at the coverage reports on a regular basis, and add tests for the uncovered methods… but you promise you will do that, won’t you? Great!

We will start by generating the reports manually, and will then move on to automating them into Jenkins, our friendly build butler.