The deprecation library provides a deprecated decorator and a fail_if_not_removed decorator for your tests. Together, the two enable the automation of several things:

1. The docstring of a deprecated method gets the deprecation details
appended to the end of it. If you generate your API docs direct
from your source, you don't need to worry about writing your own
notification. You also don't need to worry about forgetting to
write it. It's done for you.
2. Rather than having code live on forever because you only deprecated
it but never actually moved on from it, you can have your tests
tell you when it's time to remove the code. The '@deprecated'
decorator can be told when it's time to entirely remove the code,
which causes '@fail_if_not_removed' to raise an 'AssertionError',
causing either your unittest or py.test tests to fail.
This package provides the Python 2 module.