Ideally when making automated tests, you don't have to mock anything. You just test exactly what would be executed in production. Some scenarios make that a challenge, though. What if you're testing a view that relies on an external authentication service, like an LTI server?
This post describes some challenges and guidelines to be aware of when integrating a Django application with Canvas.
We needed bulk editing in our project management tool, and this post outlines how we've taken advantage of some of Django's built-in functionality to achieve this.
At CTL, we've been using smoketest for several years now. It is a standard part of our stack now and has helped us prevent numerous issues from making it to production as well as simplified and sped up the identification and fixing of production environment issues.