Suppose that you have an instance method that takes 2 arguments: one is required, while the other is a keyword argument. 

If you call that method without passing the required argument, but instead you only set the keyword argument, then you will get a TypeError exception, claiming this ...
 -> TypeError: 'method' takes at least 2 arguments (2 given)

(I am referring to this particular method: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/mock.html#mock.Mock.mock_add_spec)

@patch('xyz.subprocess.Popen')
def test_xyz(self, mocked_popen):
    mocked_popen.mock_add_spec(spec_set=True)

I think the right error message should be different, in particular should be this:
 -> TypeError: 'method' takes at least 2 arguments (1 given)

This is fixed in Python3:

>>> def foo(a, b=None):
...   pass
... 
>>> foo(b=1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: foo() missing 1 required positional argument: 'a'