You aren't the first person to have this need: this is logged as
ticket #7835. The problem exists for any project that works at the
meta level, working on models rather than with models. For example
contrib.admin needs test models in order to validate that the admin
can display different types of models correctly.

contrib.admin works around the problem by putting the tests in the
Django system test suite, rather than in the contrib app itself. Based
on your description, this sounds like the same approach Django-voting
has used. This approach works fine if you're willing to maintain an
external test suite, but doesn't provide an integrated test suite that
can be easily distributed with your app.

This is one of those problems that I want to solve, but I haven't yet
given a great deal of though into how to solve. I've got a few vague
ideas banging around in my head about allowing test application and
test model definitions to be included in the test module for an
application, but those ideas aren't fully formed. Anyone that wants to
help out with some concrete suggestions (and even better - code) is
more than welcome to do so.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)