Emanuele D'Arrigo wrote:
Hi everybody,
I just finished unit-testing a couple of tightly related modules and
it's now time to test them together to a) check if they do talk to
each other in the ways they should, b) check how fast they can talk to
each other. The problem? Well, the problem is that potentially they
can have some pretty varied conversations!! There are a lot of
different messages that they can exchange, from simple question-answer
messages to more complex [initial request, confirmation requested,
confirmation sent, final response, public announce] sequences of
messages. All this in a one-to-many context, that is one module is
effectively a server and can be connected to zero to N clients.
Right now I do not have a particularly cohesive, consistent approach
to this type of testing. In short, I've never done it before. I'll
start with some simple tests, i.e. adding and removing clients and
sending some simple sequences of messages, maybe pushing up the number
of clients to see how much gets done in, say, a second. But it feels
fairly "unscientific". =)
I've already googled "integration testing" and I'm in the process of
reading a variety of articles. Is there any one that the people of the
python community would like to recommend?
Seems like what you want here is Function tests. At this point you are
testing the whole system behavior. I presume the modules are meant to
conspire to produce a result; check that that result is produced. If
you really have a nice set of unit tests, the integration is testing
against a misunderstanding of the interface. Your functional tests begin
with simple straightforward tests, then push at definitional boundaries.
One thing to vary is client-server interaction lifetime. Make some
clients slow and others fast in your mix.
Performance testing (seeing how much you can accomplish in a second) is,
I'd argue, a later phase (where you need a good model of actual use).
First, go for correctness under "strange" interactions.
--Scott David Daniels
scott.dani...@acm.org
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