Summary¶

Ideology¶

breakdown a large test plan into small, idempotent testcases
avoid writing one-use test scripts. Focus on writing reusable testcases, and contribute your agnostic testcase to the overall pool of available tests.
divide each testcase into logical test sections, with each section further broken down into individual test steps. The goal is to create test flows that are compartmentalized and clear.
do not hard-code values/configuration directly within your testcases. Use input arguments and data files for that.
call standard API libraries (eg, pyATS/Genie libs and parsers). If an API you are looking for is missing, contribute to the common ecosystem and benefit everyone. Avoid, at all-cost, the writing of local libraries and APIs specific to your script.
where possible, perform actions in parallel
catch failures where you can. If something is failing, fail-fast.

Tag/group your testcases using the AEtest testcase grouping feature: it enables you to run selective groups of testcases without modifying your test script.
Max failures/max runtime: turn on these options to ensure your script fails fast when errors are encountered, and no testbed times are wasted
Healthchecks: leverage the pyATS healthcheck feature to ensure the auto collection of device cores/tracebacks before/after each test case

The following checklist will help you to review & revisit whether your work is truly finished:

Did you add documentation, docstrings, and README files? Make sure your script runtime environment/testbed requirement is well documented
Are healthchecks enabled?
Are you leveraging script max runtime/failure features?
Are your testcases dynamic, data-driven, and reusable? Should any of them be committed into the pyATS/Genie trigger/verification library?
Does your script leverage pyATS/Genie parsers and libraries? Does it contain local libraries, that could be committed to the common set and benefiting all users?
Did you user a linter (Flake8, PyLint etc) to lint your code?