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If there's any critical behavior you're reliant on the controller (and, in frameworks like this, its attribute-driven configuration) to provide for you - throwi
by jameshart 5y ago
If there's any critical behavior you're reliant on the controller (and, in frameworks like this, its attribute-driven configuration) to provide for you - throwing exceptions for bad requests, authentication or authorization, returning particular cache headers for particular response cases... I'd recommend looking for some way to write tests that, in isolation, go some way to let you assert those behaviors.
Don't bother writing the testcase that asserts that if the controller is called with a valid body, it calls the right service and passes on the request data. Write the testcase that asserts that if it's called with a body that's way too big that it throws the appropriate 400 exception, though.
One of the biggest problems with web frameworks which let you configure a lot of stuff like caching, auth and parameter validation using attributes, DI, or magic syntax, is that often the only way you can verify those behaviors are in place is with integration tests. And integration tests for failure modes are hard to write, so they don't get written. Which means it's easy to deploy a service which, say, is supposed to respond with stale cached data if a dependency is unavailable - but it actually doesn't because nobody was able to express a test case that verified that the controller caching attributes actually work the way they thought it did.
- tester34 5y agoFor Selenium tests I've been setting up an actual instance of application in test with different Startup (e.g sqlite instead of real database) and running at different port This way you can test those fancy things, but I agree it's kinda "hard" to get it working for the first time
- Jenk 5y agoand wasteful. Starting up selenium et al is painfully slow compared to tests that run in <seconds.
- tester34 5y agoWhile I do agree, then you don't have to run Selenium tests on your PC, but let it be done by e.g ci/cd Also depends how many pages do you want to test with Selenium - if you want to test e.g 5 pages, then it'll be fast enough I guess. There are a few tricks/configurations that make Selenium significantly faster - https://stackoverflow.com/a/57720610 https://stackoverflow.com/a/57720610 A lot of is also on how do you write your "testing infrastructure" - maybe you could reuse engine/browser instance? execute tests parallelly? There's also alternative to Selenium by Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright https://github.com/microsoft/playwright AFAIK it's way more reliable than Selenium (false errors) __________ Overall you can still start application inside tests with different startup, without Selenium and send http requests, so you'll have end-to-end tests done fast.
- Jenk 5y agoRelying on CI server to run tests is even slower :) Note I am not stating "don't use CI" as that is still an invaluable tool. The waste I am referring to is time it takes to get that feedback whilst the work is being actively developed. A simple feature of a controller (to borrow someone else's example) is to change the response based on an attribute's configuration. It is wholly astonishing that one needs a _web-server_ to test that.