Detecting incorrect assertion methods

During one of the recent code reviews, I've stumbled upon the problem that was not immediately easy to spot - there was assertTrue() used instead of assertEqual() that basically resulted into a test that was testing nothing. Here is a simplified example:

from unittest import TestCase


class MyTestCase(TestCase):
    def test_two_things_equal(self):
        self.assertTrue("a", "b")

The problem here is that the test would pass; and technically, the code is valid, since assertTrue has this optional msg argument (that gets the "b" value in this case).

Can we do better than rely on the person reviewing the code to spot this kind of problems? Is there a way to auto-detect it using static code analysis with flake8 or pylint?

from Detecting incorrect assertion methods