[hinkley]

Trust, but verify.

We've always found that writing your own smoke tests for the other guy's code saves a lot of head scratching and the game I like to call Blame Tennis, when each side insists that any new problem must be in the other side's stuff because surely WE haven't broken anything.

[jacques_chester]

These have become known in Pivotal as "frenemy tests". Poke a remote API to see that a) it is running b) it hasn't dropped a world-stopping change.

Typically run as a pre-build sanity check when you have remote integrations.

On some Labs projects we've written extensive request tests and stub services based on documentation, then handed those to the upstream service. Usually there is some angst at this point, being the first time that any kind of TDD suite has turned up to ask awkward questions.

[hinkley]

I still maintain F5 owes me a job. I did QA for them for a year back in the dot-com boom. The first couple of versions of BigIP didn't really support session affinity, despite being the flagship feature. I think we filed something like 6-8 pretty big bugs, all in different parts of the code.

Sadly, despite not working, they were still about 4 years ahead of their competitors.