What is an “incremental test runner” ?

The idea is to execute your tests faster by executing not all of them but only the “required” ones.

When talking about build-tools it is common to refer to the terms:

• initial (full) build - all files are compiled
• incremental build (or partial rebuild) - just changed files are compiled
• no-op build - no files are compiled (none changed since last execution)

So an “incremental test runner” will only re-execute tests that were affected by changes in the source code since last successful execution.

How pytest-incremental compares to testmon ?

Both projects have a similar goal but have completely different implementations. testmon uses coverage.py to trace the execution of tests while pytest-incremental analyses the imported dependencies.

• testmon can track sub-module dependencies, so it can de-select more tests that pytest-incremental
• testmon does not re-order tests according to the source structure
• because testmon traces the code execution the test execution is slower than normally