The Odoo web interface is meant for end users, although the developer mode unlocks a number of powerful features. However, testing and debugging through the web interface is not the easiest way to do things, as you need to manually prepare the data, navigate in the menus to perform actions, and so on. The Odoo shell is a command-line interface, which you can use to issue calls. This recipe shows how to start the Odoo shell and perform actions such as calling a method inside the shell.