Chapter 16. Developer Tools

Over the course of its lifetime, Python has evolved an extensive ecosystem of modules intended to make the lives of Python developers easier by eliminating the need to build everything from scratch. That same philosophy has been applied to the tools developers use to do their work, even if they are not used in the final version of a program. This chapter covers the modules included with Python to provide facilities for common development tasks such as testing, debugging, and profiling.

The most basic form of help for developers is the documentation for code they are using. The pydoc module generates formatted reference documentation from the docstrings included in the source code for any importable module.