[pylons-discuss] triggering failures during integrated tests?

[Jonathan Vanasco]

One of my applications provides both an oAuth1 server for authentication
and client for requesting authorization.

Unit tests are fine, but I'd like to trigger failure on certain phases
during the integrated tests, and could use some advice.

The types of things I'm hoping to test, are basically shutting off certain
subsystems or submitting malformed requests. These all have unit tests that
pass, but they should have integrated tests to ensure the requests are
failing in the expected ways.

Because the authorization route makes a behind-the-scenes request to the
same server for the request_token route, I need to run waitress with at
least 2 threads. Since I'm using 2 threads, I can't rely on hitting an
endpoint before the request saying "(en|dis)able fail mode!" - only one
thread would get it.

I'm looking at a handful of potential options that range from
middleware/tweens to subscribers and hiding stuff in __debug__ blocks to
get optimized out of production. Before I select a crazed,
overcomplicated, approach... does anyone have a suggestion for handling
this sort of testing need?