At TaxSpanner as we were entering the "filing season" we wanted an continues integration system in place which could tests independent apps and stage them for further testing. We setup jenkins, created pipeline for different apps but as models grew and migrations were getting added, the whole pipeline started crawling.

There are different moving parts in whole application, say app1, app2, app3 and so on. While many of applications do interact with each other using API's but somehow application level testing using manage.py doesn't exactly limit things to just that particular app. What I mean is, say I am working on app2 running its test using

./apps/manage.py test app2

will still load all installed_apps and try to get your "test DB ready with all models, indexes and migrations". With the complicated models this preparing process itself was taking hours(2 hrs+). I am not sure about what would be standard approach for such a setup, should we "include" settings from each app individually? Anyway, so because of that behavior of django's test suite we struggled and even started avoiding writing/running tests.

Somedays back, as we started work on revamping an app around django-rest-framework and I was again stuck at this issue. While looking around I was just experimenting with settings and added this "hack" at the end of settings.py

import sys
if 'test' in sys.argv or 'test_coverage' in sys.argv:
    INSTALLED_APPS = ('app2', 'rest_framework', 'usermanagement',
		      'django.contrib.sites', 'registration',
		      'django.contrib.sitemaps',
		      'django.contrib.webdesign',)

and voila, my tests were back on track, under a minute(~10 seconds) with no unrelated apps. There were further suggestions to make things more faster by team :

DATABASES['default']['ENGINE'] = 'django.db.backends.sqlite3'

and further to avoid migrations,

class DisableMigrations(object):
    def __contains__(self, item):
	return True

    def __getitem__(self, item):
	return "notmigrations"
MIGRATION_MODULES = DisableMigrations()