Following Jim’s talk on zc.ngi, I attended Kumar McMillan talk on using Fixtures to test your programs. According to McMillan, fixtures differ from mock objects in one important way: they use real objects with real data. I haven’t used fixtures or mock objects much, so that was a useful distinction.

McMillan is the developer of the fixture package, which provides a way of loading and referencing test data for your application. fixture also allows you to write tests against fixture objects using either a mixin or a decorator[1]_. Fixture supports loading data into SQLAlchemy and SQLObject; CSV and possible Django support are also under consideration.

Fixture is a relatively young project, but it does appear to be useful for testing data-driven applications.