[LRUG] Testing SOAs

[Jonathan]

Hi there,

I'd like to know if any of you have any advice for testing Service Oriented
Architectures. Specifically the mocking of boundaries between services.
Each team I've worked with in a SOA environment has a different approach to
the way they isolate their services from each other for testing. E.g.

 - use VCR to connect to the genuine service the first time and save a
response
 - create clients for your services, and use mock clients during testing,
or stub the real clients explicitly in tests.
 - create fake services that respond to the same interface as the real
service but just return dummy responses (as in this talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mesJxUVZyI around 11:45).

Each one seems to have its problems. The first is probably my preferred but
I'm encountering some resistance to using it. The second and third are
basically the same thing at a different level, and when I've seen these
approaches used I've noticed they usually get very complicated. On occasion
I've seen them end up with their own test suite.

How do you go about mocking out the interfaces between services in your
projects so that test suites can run in isolation? Do you use anything
different to what I've just mentioned?

Thanks!
Jono.
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