Hiccupps

How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the question is asked. This post is one answer, for now. A service I work on exposes an API for internal and external clients and calls multiple other services. It orchestrates a reasonably complex journey for a user, with their inputs and the responses of the services determining each step.  Our customers can configure the service to provide a variant of the standard journey for their users. This gives them choices on the available steps, the order of the steps, and, importantly, some of the logic for taking particular steps. This configuration lives in a different repository to the service, not owned by us, and it can be changed and deployed independently from the service. As you can imagine, we test our service in multiple ways at different granularities using the usual tooling, including unit tests fo...

In Looking Good, Testers!  I made the case that testing is about looking and that delegating the looking to someone or something  else involves a risk calculation: do you both understand the task the same way, is the third party likely to carry out the task in the way you requested, how easily can you check any results they give back, could they complement you in some way, how will you keep your knowledge and skills up to date if you don't do this task any more, how much does this task matter, how much do you care about any of that, ...? I didn't say anything there about selecting what to look at or for  ... and I'm not going to talk about it here either because it's essentially the whole of testing. I will note one thing, though: to find things other people don't find,  look where other people don't look .  What I do want to cover here is looking at things that, arguably, you don't need to.  My team was recently asked to add a new layer to a service we ow...