Going further
Can you do more to improve your build, and shift problems left (before they hit CI or production)? Of course! Below are some topics to discuss with your team about making them part of the local build.
What is the "Test Pyramid"? This is an important conceptual framework for validating your project at multiple levels of interaction. Canonical resources describing the test pyramid include:
As you move your testing "to the left" (helping local builds cover more concerns), you'll want to enhance your build with more testing at different levels of interaction. These are not covered in this article, so research is needed.
There are alternatives to the "test pyramid" perspective. Consider swiss cheese if it makes more sense for your project. The build techniques still apply.
NB — What this article calls "integration tests" may have a different name for your team. You may have "system tests" for example.
"Live testing" here means spinning up a database or other remote service for local tests, and not using fakes, stubs, mocks, spies, dummies, or doubles. In these tests, your project calls on real external dependencies, albeit dependencies spun up locally rather than in production or another environment. These might be call "out of process" tests.
This is a complex topic, and this document is no guide on these. Some potentially useful resources to pull into your build:
- Flyway — Version your schema in production, and version your test data
- LocalStack — Local testing for AWS services
- TestContainers — Local Docker for real database instances, or any Docker-provided service
Depending on your program, you may want additional testing specific to circumstances. For example, with REST services and Spring Cloud, consider:
There are many options in this area. Find the choices which work best for you and your project.
Another dimension to consider for local testing: User Journey tests.
See the code repo for working examples.
This work is dedicated/deeded to the public following laws in jurisdictions
for such purpose.
The principal authors are: