I was just reading an article about Martijn Pieters, who is a python expert, and he mentioned
monkey patching
I did not know what monkey patching is, so I googled it, and found a great answer on stack overflow
Basically, it takes advantage of python’s class access philosophy. Unlike java, which has a strict access policy, in python, all attributes and methods of a class are mutable. So it is possible to write code like this:
from SomeOtherProduct.SomeModule import SomeClass
def speak(self):
return "ook ook eee eee eee!"
SomeClass.speak = speak
This could be particularly useful for unittesting, which is also mentioned in the stackoverflow answer
For instance, consider a class that has a method get_data. This method does an external lookup (on a database or web API, for example), and various other methods in the class call it. However, in a unit test, you don’t want to depend on the external data source – so you dynamically replace the get_datamethod with a stub that returns some fixed data.