Development of version 5 of coverage.py is going slowly, but it is progressing. The latest alpha is out: coverage.py 5.0a5.

The biggest changes are due to Stephan Richter and Justas Sadzevičius, from Shoobox. They improved the support for recording dynamic contexts, informally known as Who Tests What.

Now third-party code, either as a coverage.py plugin or using the coverage.py API can set the dynamic context.

I’ve added support for this to the pytest-cov plugin, to record the pytest test id as the dynamic context. If you’d like to try it:

pip install coverage==5.0a5
pip install git+https://github.com/nedbat/pytest-cov.git@nedbat/contexts
pytest --cov=. --cov-context

The .coverage data file is now a SQLite database. Coverage.py has no support yet for using the collected context data, but you can examine the raw data in the database:

$ sqlite3 .coverage
SQLite version 3.19.3 2017-06-27 16:48:08
Enter ".help" for usage hints.

sqlite> select * from context;
id          context
----------  --------------------------------------------------
1
2           test_it.py::test_prod1|setup
3           test_it.py::test_prod1|call
4           test_it.py::test_prod1|teardown
5           test_it.py::test_prod2|setup
6           test_it.py::test_prod2|call
7           test_it.py::test_prod2|teardown
8           test_it.py::test_prod3[1-1]|setup
9           test_it.py::test_prod3[1-1]|call
10          test_it.py::test_prod3[1-1]|teardown
11          test_it.py::test_prod3[10-100]|setup
12          test_it.py::test_prod3[10-100]|call
13          test_it.py::test_prod3[10-100]|teardown
14          test_it.py::test_prod3[11-121]|setup
15          test_it.py::test_prod3[11-121]|call
16          test_it.py::test_prod3[11-121]|teardown

sqlite> select * from arc where context_id = 9;
file_id     context_id  fromno      tono
----------  ----------  ----------  ----------
1           9           -14         15
1           9           15          16
1           9           16          17
1           9           17          -14

sqlite> select * from file where id = 1;
id          path
----------  --------------------------------------------------
1           /Users/ned/lab/pytest_func_test/src/product.py

I’m looking for feedback about what kinds of reporting would be useful. Stephan has a pull request to provide some context-based reporting. Does it do what you want? Have you used contexts? What needs to happen before they are ready for everybody?