Efficient enterprise testing — conclusion (6/6)

#testing friday, october 04, 2019

This last part of the series will cover additional end-to-end tests, testing in production, and a conclusion of the parts.

Further end-to-end tests & testing in production

Besides system tests that only verify a single application-under-test and mock external concerns, our pipeline must also include full end-to-end test that verify the system as a whole. The good news is that if we’re crafting our tests in a maintainable way, with reusable components, we can recycle the test scenarios to be fired against other test or staging environments.

It depends on the nature of the business logic, to which regard that is feasible, if for example the system then actually orders a coffee or performs a financial transaction. In these cases it might be possible to add additional business steps, for example add an immediate “undo” transactions or something similar.

As an outlook, this touches the topic of testing in production, verifying the same logical paths that the users also go through and making sure that the tests have no negative impact in the business process, such as ordering actual coffee. Testing in production is, after all the efforts on a test scope, the ultimate verification, whether our system works as expected. Defining our test scenarios in a reasonable way, being driven by the actual business use cases with test code quality in mind, make this endeavor easier to pursue.

Conclusion

Favor simple test technology with well-crafted test code
Limit the use of test cases that require additional test runners (e.g. Spring Tests, Arquillian, CDI-Unit)
Separate test life cycles from test environment life cycles
For microservice architectures, favor system over code-level tests
Define local development workflows that can run system tests immediately, against already running environments
In both system and code-level test scenarios, craft reusable components which separate multiple concerns
Use delegation and abstraction layers to separate concerns
Test code quality is more important than the choice of technology
Be aware of the trade-offs of the different test scopes to craft a balanced, effective test suite

Further resources

All parts of this article series

If you’re interested in effective testing with Quarkus, have a look at my next online workshop on July 27th, 2021.

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