Speed up unit test suite

[mssalvatore]

Spike

Objective

The unit test suite currently takes about 2.5 seconds to run on my machine. Shave as much time off as possible.

Scope

Time boxed to 1 day. @mssalvatore (0.25d)

Output

A set of code changes that result in a faster unit test execution time.

Areas of investigation

• Collection currently takes .84 seconds
  • Perhaps translating some tests from unittest to pytest will improve collection time.
• The test_is_dead() test has a 1 second sleep in it.
  • For starters, this looks like 3 tests: alive monkey, mia monkey, and dead monkey.
  • Is there a better way to test this functionality that doesn't require a sleep?
    • Maybe we can mock out time instead of actually waiting in real time.
    • Maybe we can inject different data into the database using mongomock.
• Investigate using pytest-xdist to run tests in parallel.