[LRUG] Testing SOAs

[Jon Wood]

My experience so far in moving to an SOA from a big Rails monolith is that
you probably need to find a balance between stubbed clients and running
requests through the entire stack.

When unit testing, and for initial smoke tests on the integration side,
stubbing out responses works well to keep things moving quickly enough to
give yourself a level of confidence, but that doesn't guarantee that the
interface you're coding to actually corresponds with reality, so you'll
find yourself needing to run the entire stack for integration testing as
well. If anyone has any good advice on making that actually happen I'd love
to hear it, because we've yet to reach a point of being happy on that side.

Jon


On 23 June 2014 19:46, Jonathan <j.fantham at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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