Tests are difficult to run on an installed version of the package

[wshanks]

Information

• Qiskit Metal version: 0.1.2
• Python version: 3.10
• Operating system: Linux

What is the current behavior?

The way the tests are structured right now makes it difficult to run all of them on an installed version of qiskit-metal.

The way the CI runs the tests is to run

python -m unittest

from the top level of the repo. Since qiskit_metal is in the top level (rather than using a src directory), the repo version of qiskit-metal gets imported by Python rather than the one in site-packages.

The tests are actually packaged inside of qiskit_metal.tests, so you can actually run most of the tests against the installed version of qiskit-metal by changing the working directory to something other than the top level of the repo and then running

python -m unittest discover qiskit_metal.tests

This will run the tests, but a few of them will fail because they to access qiskit_metal/tests/test_data which is not currently included in the package.

One can also try changing directory into qiskit_metal and running

python -m unittest discover tests

to avoid importing the repo qiskit_metal but some of the test code has relative imports out of the tests package to other parts of qiskit-metal so this also fails.

Steps to reproduce the problem

The problem is not being able to do something so it is hard to give a reproducer but some possible cases are given above. For testing a solution, one could:

1. Install qiskit_metal
2. Introduce a bug into the qiskit_metal in the repo
3. Confirm that the tests still run without encountering the bug

What is the expected behavior?

There is a way to run the tests against the installed version of qiskit_metal.

Suggested solutions

There are a couple options:

1. Include qiskit_metal/tests/test_data in the package. It is small in size compared to the tests files already included, though including test code in a package is not that common.
2. Move the tests up out of qiskit_metal, so one could run them without needing to add the top level of the repo to the Python path. This would require a little bit of tweaking of the code because some imports assume the test files are inside of the qiskit_metal package.