mock provides a core Mock class that removes the need to create a host of trivial stubs throughout your test suite. After performing an action, you can make assertions about which methods / attributes were used and arguments they were called with. You can also specify return values and set specific attributes in the normal way.

• http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mock/

The mock module also provides a patch() decorator that handles safely patching out the things you are mocking during your test.

We'll cover standard mocking patterns, and how mock makes them easy. We'll also be looking at some of the newer features in the latest release, including the magic method support that can be used (for example) for mocking out objects used as context managers.

mock is designed for "unit test style" testing, but is used with Python testing libraries like nose and py.test.

There will be some emphasis on how *not* to use mocking in testing, and why 'over mocking' is bad (and makes for brittle tests).