Interview Alexa

A Python Testing Framework for Alexa using ASK CLI

Installation:

pip install interview-alexa

Typical usage:

import unittest
from interview_alexa import say


class TestingAllTheThings(unittest.TestCase):

    @say('open my skill')
    def test_launch_intent(self, result):
        self.assertEqual(result, 'My expected result')

if __name__ == '__main__':
unittest.main()

Prerequisites

• Install node

  • https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/

• Install and initialize ask-cli

  • https://developer.amazon.com/docs/smapi/quick-start-alexa-skills-kit-command-line-interface.html

    npm install -g ask-cli ask init

• Follow the ask-cli prompts

• Export environment variables:

export SKILL_ID=amzn1.ask.skill.12345
export ASK_DEFAULT_DEVICE_LOCALE=en-US

• Clone your existing Alexa skill:

ask clone echo SKILL_ID

Usage

Inside the directory of your cloned skill, create a file called tests.py

project
│
└───My_Cloned_Skill
	│
	└───tests.py

Writing Tests:

import unittest
from interview_alexa import say


class TestingAllTheThings(unittest.TestCase):

    @say('open my skill')
    def test_launch_intent(self, result):
        self.assertEqual(result, "My expected result")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

Options:

• debug=True

@say('open my skill', debug=True)
def test_launch_intent(self, result):
    self.assertEqual(result, "My expected result")

    # => will produce a verbose output from ask-cli

Simple Testing:

cd My_Skill
python tests.py

--

A passing test would output something like:

✓ Simulation created for simulation id: 1234-5679-910112-abc-123
◠ Waiting for simulation response.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 5.848s

OK

Dialog Testing

Since the Python test runner executes tests alphabetical by test name, you'll want to ensure that any tests that simulate dialog are named alphabetically.

@say('open my skill')
def test_aa__begin_dialog(self, result):
    self.assertEqual(result, "My expected result")

@say('do something with my skill')
def test_ab__continue_dialog(self, result):
    self.assertEqual(result, "My expected result")

If the expected result is a delegated dialog, your response may not include any output speech. In that case, you may want to pass:

@say('do something with my skill')
def test_ac__delegated_dialog(self, result):
    pass

Local Testing

This package takes advantage of a another great package called python-lambda-local to run tests locally.

pip install python-lambda-local

In order to do so, we use ask-cli to record your request events, and python-lambda-local to test against recorded events.

First, make sure to import the record and localize functions. Then run record in your tests module's setUp method:

import unittest
from interview_alexa import say, record, localize


class TestingAllTheThings(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        record(self)

    @say('open my skill')
    def test_aa__launch_intent(self, result):
        self.assertEqual(result, 'My expected result')

...

Once you've run your test with record mode on, you should see a tmp folder in your working directory with some JSON files with the same names as your tests.

project
│
└───My_Cloned_Skill
	│
	└───tests.py
	│
	└───tmp
	  │
	  └───__main__.TestingAllTheThings.test_aa.json

Now that you have some events recorded locally, you can run your tests in localize mode, and run your tests again with python tests.py as you normally would.

import unittest
from interview_alexa import say, record, localize


class TestingAllTheThings(unittest.TestCase):

  def setUp(self):
      # record(self)
      localize(self, 'path/to/lambda/handler.py') # Default is lambda/custom/handler.py

...