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If it's an accounting service, make a new account/table named "Software test". Book-keeping was invented to spot errors. If you have a non zero balance in your

• hibbelig 8y ago
  So I write some code and a test, and of course the first time I run the code, the test is going to fail. So now the balance in our "Software test" account is nonzero whereas it should be zero. But audit requires us to record all bookings, so how do we explain these bogus bookings (both from the erroneous code that made the mistake in the first place, and from the manual adjustment later that fixes the mistake for the next test run)?
  • z3t4 8y ago
    You can have many types of tests. First you have assertions and unit tests with mocks/injections that runs at compile time together with the type checker and other low level tests. Then you have the integration tests that makes sure your code works together with third parties and other API's. Those tests might seem unnecessary when you already have unit tests, but it's very nice to know if some third party have made breaking changes and that your software have stopped working because of it.
• moring 8y ago
  Unfortunately, this wasn't possible for two reasons. The first one was that we would not just need one account, but several ones. Though it might have been possible to limit this for the integration test, and test all the stuff that deals with multiple accounts by mocking the accounting system. The second problem is that even a fake account doesn't belong on production, not in accounting. They are very strict about such things.