Unit Tests & Integration Tests

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

+1!

On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 12:59 PM, roger peppe <rogpeppe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 September 2014 16:29, Matthew Williams
> <matthew.williams at canonical.com> wrote:
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> There seems to be a general push in the direction of having more mocking in
>> unit tests. Obviously this is generally a good thing but there is still
>> value in having integration tests that test a number of packages together.
>> That's the subject of this mail - I'd like to start discussing how we want
>> to do this. Some ideas to get the ball rolling:
>
> Personally, I don't believe this is "obviously" a good thing.
> The less mocking, the better, in my view, because it gives
> better assurance that the code will actually work in practice.
>
> Mocking also implies that you know exactly what the
> code is doing internally - this means that tests written
> using mocking are less useful as regression tests, as
> they will often need to be changed when the implementation
> changes.
>
> Two good reasons to mock stuff in tests:
>
> 1) because it's awkward or impossible to use the real code in a test
> environment.
> 2) because the real code is slow or unreliable.
>
> When neither of these two criteria apply, I believe we should
> avoid mocking.
>
> As for integration tests, I think we should run them by default,
> but provide a flag for skipping slow tests. The go test command has a "-short"
> flag that can be used to skip long-running tests. Perhaps
> we could consider doing something similar (perhaps triggered
> with an environment variable).
>
>   cheers,
>     rog.
>
>> Having integration tests spread about the package and having environment
>> variables that switch on/ off them being run
>>
>> $ JUJU_INTEGRATION go test ./...
>>
>> We could make use of build tags:
>>
>> $ go test -tags integration ./...
>>
>> We could put all the integration tests in a single package:
>>
>> $ go test github.com/juju/juju/integrationtests/...
>>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Matty
>>
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>
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-- 

gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net