Unit: There’s some debate about what exactly a unit test is. But anything that tests dependencies can be slower and flaky. Integration tests let you test actions like SQL queries that cannot be tested without accessing dependencies, and they do it without all the baggage that comes from running a full setup. Like with e2e tests, you can use mocks and stubs to prevent actions like sending emails to customers, but the point of an integration test is to test how a feature works with dependencies, so consider using the real thing when you can. These don’t cover the whole application and are automated. Integration: These test how a feature works with its dependencies. On the downside, because e2e tests span the entire application, they can be both slow and flaky. When e2e tests pass, you can have a high degree of confidence that the application works as expected-at least for happy path actions, edge cases and errors take a lot of work to test in e2e. You can set up mock version of these, but often they’ll use the real thing. If you have a mature set of e2e, integration, and unit tests that cover the regression part, then you want your testers to find bugs by using their creativity.Įnd-to-end (e2e): These tests simulate how a real user would interact with your application, and therefore require a complete application setup, including networking, databases, and dependencies. Testers shouldn’t have extensive manual regression tests plans that they follow for each change/release. You give them early builds and let them bang on it until something breaks. Here’s how we define the different categories of tests and their benefits and shortcomings.Įxploratory testing: This type of testing lets QA engineers and testers focus on what they’re good at: finding edge cases and bugs. A refresher on test typesīefore we dive into how we’re adding unit tests to our dev cycle, let’s go over the common test types. This article will cover what we’re doing to ramp up our unit testing program. I’ve been singing the praises of unit testing for good while now, and I’m excited to bring them to Stack Overflow. If you’re looking to enable test-driven development (and we are), as well as quickly test new features, then you should be writing unit tests. End-to-end and integration tests are fine and part of a balanced testing program, but they can be slow. We had integration test suites in place, but our testing infrastructure-in particular, our unit tests-lagged far behind the maturity of our product. Unlike our community site users, they didn’t want to find bugs in production. We suddenly had a paid product that big companies were using. The site was made for developers, and we found that a lot of users were happy enough to report bugs and work around them while we fixed them.įast forward to a few years back when we launched Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise. Like all startups, we prioritized the quality attributes that mattered most to us and let many others fall by the wayside, including unit testing according to best practices. was built for developers by developers as a small startup. In the early days of Stack Overflow, we were just one website running a fast and lean operation.
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