What's the meaning of the percentages displayed for each test on PyTest?

Question

I'm new to testing with Pytest, and I've run into a minor but annoying hangup.

In the command line test session results, I see my tests passing, but the percentage shown is not 100%, for some tests.

With some aggressive logging, I was able to confirm that my tests are passing as expected.

My question is: what's the meaning of the percentage that is displayed for the collected tests?

Example:

platform win32 -- Python 3.7.0a4, pytest-3.5.0, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: C:\api-check, inifile:
collected 5 items

test_Me.py ...                                                           [ 60%]
test_env.py ..                                                           [100%]

========================== 5 passed in 6.04 seconds ===========================

Percentage of total tesks collected. e.g. collected 5 item... `test_Me.py` has 3 tests = 60%... not super sophisticated — abigperson, Apr 09 '18 at 17:05
@abigperson That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How can 60% of the tests be in `test_Me` and 100% of the tests in `test_env`? Last time I checked, that wasn't how percentages work. — Aran-Fey, Apr 09 '18 at 17:07
Perhaps the percentage is cumulative? Try adding a third test file and see what the output looks like. — Code-Apprentice, Apr 09 '18 at 17:10
I started a PR to update the pytest docu with the answers provided below (Thanks!): https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/pull/6686. Please feel free to comment or vote on it. — Katrin Leinweber, Feb 28 '20 at 12:30

score 60 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 09 '18 at 17:09

60

This is a makeshift progress bar.

It displays the "percentage of work" done so far -- most probably, total completed tests by the total number of tests to run (that it precalculated at the start).

If your tests ran for longer, you would probably see the number in the line changing as it crunches through the specific file.

answered Apr 09 '18 at 17:09

ivan_pozdeev

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2

Thank you! I feel foolish for getting so hung up on this, now. :) – klreeher Apr 09 '18 at 17:15
19

Wow, that is not at all obvious. – FGreg May 13 '19 at 19:25
3

ha something new every day. I had this rooted believe deep down that it's some sort of a coverage report, but it did not make any sense to me. Finally cleared, thanks! – Chris Dec 13 '19 at 08:16

ivanleoncz · Answer 2 · 2019-04-02T21:48:30.650

It's one of the features included on Pytest, since version 3.3 (2017).

As my comrade @ivan_pozdeev mentioned, it's a progress indicator, indeed.

Here's an example, where you have 4 tests collected:

$ pytest test.py -v
================================ test session starts =============================
platform linux -- Python 3.6.7, pytest-4.4.0, py-1.8.0, pluggy-0.9.0 -- /usr/bin/python3
cachedir: .pytest_cache
rootdir: /home/ivanleoncz/git/pysd
collected 4 items                                                                           
test.py::test_active_services PASSED                                        [ 25%]
test.py::test_enabled_services PASSED                                       [ 50%]
test.py::test_is_enabled PASSED                                             [ 75%]
test.py::test_is_active PASSED                                              [100%]

============================== 4 passed in 0.55 seconds ==========================

100% of the tests / the amount of collected tests == a progression of 25%, from one test to another

What's the meaning of the percentages displayed for each test on PyTest?

2 Answers2