Functionals tests are rather opaque

[bwohlberg]

The high level structure of scico.tests.test_functional.py is quite difficult to follow, in part due to the large number of helper functions, which make it difficult to identify the overall structure the main entry points for the tests. It would benefit greatly from some additional comments to explain the structure and identify the main components.

[Michael-T-McCann]

From discussion w/ Luke: the fixtures exist because it was hard to parametrize over dtype. It also avoids instantiating a LinOp repeatedly.

[lukepfister]

So, to summarize:

The use of fixtures is so that you can choose a dtype and instantiate test variables only once. As far as I can remember, you cant use a pytest.parameterize on a test class __init__ method.

This isn't a big deal for the functional tests; you could certainly swap out the fixtures for parameterized tests. The fixture approach was first used in the LinOp tests because LinOp construction is rather slow, and we didn't want to be re-instantiating LinOps for each test.

I'm happy to walk through how the fixtures work if it would be helpful, or you can see here

[Michael-T-McCann]

Moved to the internal list of long-term projects.