[sanderjd]

That's basically what we did, but more like mocking things at the network communication boundary. But for an integration test, it was often unsatisfactory, because of things behaving differently than they do in the real world. We also had a suite of automated tests that communicated with real devices in a lab, which were much better, but extremely hard to maintain. My general experience was: tenable, but tricky. So I'd love to hear how others have handled similar things.

[crdoconnor]

Was it not possible to build upon the mock device to make it run more realistically?

I pretty much do this habitually now:

1. Get report of bug in production or on staging.

2. Write test to reproduce the bug.

3. 2/3 of the time get stuck because the environment isn't capable of mimicking the bug.

4. Build upon the integration testing environment to make it capable of mimicking the bug.

I find the counter intuitive part of integration testing is that step 4 ends up being where most of the work is required and far too many people just don't do it because they feel it's not a worthwhile investment.

I actually ended up writing an open source framework to handle a lot of the boilerplate (which no other frameworks do AFAIK). Especially making mock devices easier to write (see http://hitchtest.com/ and check out HitchSMTP).

[sanderjd]

> I find the counter intuitive part of integration testing is that step 4 ends up being where most of the work is required and far too many people just don't do it because they feel it's not a worthwhile investment.

That's all I'm saying: tenable, but difficult (read: expensive). Frankly, I'm not convinced it is a worthwhile investment. Hence, my interest in how others have approached a similar problem.

Hitch looks pretty nifty, but I'm not sold on the yml/jinja2 approach. I grew to loathe Cucumber, and this approach seems similar. If you can't convince your non-technical staff to write tests in this language (which, in my experience, you can't), then you're better off writing the honest-to-god code that programmers are comfortable with (and can more easily modularize and refactor). YMMV I suppose!

[crdoconnor]

I don't like cucumber either. I dumped it on a previous project and just wrote code instead which I found to be easier too. In many ways this project was borne out of the frustrations I felt.

YAML is different. It has much clearer syntax and the method mapping is super easy and can even easily handle more complex data structures being passed in in the steps (lists, dicts, lists of dicts, etc.) which Cucumber either couldn't do, or required tortuous syntax and horrible regexps to do.

I did it this way mainly to adhere to the rule of least power and to enforce separation of concerns between execution code and test scenarios. Readability by non-programmers is just a nice side effect.

I suppose one day I might make a GUI to generate the YAML - maybe then non-technical staff might write tests, but probably not before.