Dopplegangers in the web sphere: Decoupling Web Service Components In Test
A talk I gave at the NYC Selenium Meetup http://www.meetup.com/NYCSelenium/events/215048092/ Refactoring a legacy application — an essential phase of the Software Development Life Cycle — cannot even be discussed without simultaneously discussing the art and science of Software Testing. In this lecture I will explore the pragmatic use of comprehensible, platform-independent tools for Black Box Web API Testing. In the interest of refactoring and maintaining Web-delivered services, integration tests necessarily require the capability to play back a transaction frame by frame. In other contexts it may also be desirable to play back certain control loops within a longer transactional chain. It is not technically challenging to create ad hoc solutions for these problems. Rather, it is the use of ad hoc solutions in test as a practice that creates unacceptable risk. Because almost-inevitably home rolled solutions will contain non-trivial undocumented domain-specific languages. The cure is generally worse than the disease. Therefore in the interest of obviating the need for ad hoc solutions to the problem of test doubles for Web services, I will present what I think are some very simple, platform-agnostic implementations of the xUnit Test Patterns at the level-of-abstraction of Web APIs and Web services. Test Doubles are particularly useful in Web testing so I will go into detail with regard to mockingspyingfaking andWeb API-level record-and-playback tools such as:Python’s SimpleHTTPServerMySQL ProxyCurl I will also present a brief history of Web client spoofing for those unfamiliar with the practice. Takeaways from this lecture include: How to make tests faster by getting rid of dependencies on third party services.How to “game day” the condition where a third-party service goes down or gets hacked.Introduction/insight into a laundry list of Black-Box Testing tools for Web APIs and Web-delivered services. BIO: Noah Sussman has been helping bricks-and-mortar businesses to leverage the Web since 1999. Thus he has had had ample opportunity to think about the discrepancies between how computers and people see the world. He lives in New York with his wife and two cats.
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Dopplegangers in the web sphere: Decoupling Web Service Components In Test
- 1. Noah Sussman NYC Testers Meetup at Viacom, November 2014 Dopplegangers! A discussion about Collaborators, Fakes, and Mocks
- 4. ✤ jq: JSON query language ✤ Python SimpleHTTPServer ✤ JSON API spoofing ✤ Chrome Inspector ✤ The BASE tag — forgotten relic of ancient power! SimpleTools For ComplicatedTasks
- 5. ✤ Debugging is much harder than writing code in the first place. ✤ Automated tests that you cannot debug are worse than useless: such tests provide a FALSE sense of confidence. Why not build a framework?
- 6. Ironies of automation ✤ Testing is harder than writing the code under test ✤ Testing is yet another layer(s) of complexity ✤ Tests that are opaque dramatically increase cost while adding zero value ✤ There is NO value in flaky, hard-to-debug tests ✤ rm -rf * SERIOUSLY
- 7. jq the JSON parser ✤ transform any data source into JSON ✤ transform JSON into executable code ✤ create ETL pipelines ✤ unlimited POWER
- 8. jq: SQL queries for JSON ✤ Compiled C binary, just like find, grep and awk ✤ Does one thing and does it well ✤ Can transform any text input into valid JSON ✤ Only emits valid JSON. Anything else is a fatal error. ✤ Extremely fast, if you’re into that ;-)
- 9. Convert plain text logs to JSON.
- 10. Convert plain text logs to JSON.
- 22. Chrome Inspector NetworkTab ✤ View all the assets that were loaded by the browser ✤ Watch XHR requests happen in real time ✤ Download cached copies of JSON API responses!
- 25. Visual Inspection ✤ Examine HTTP conversations in the Net tab ✤ Locate JSON feeds ✤ Download JSON documents ✤ “Replay” documents in test using SimpleHTTPServer
- 30. Sufficiently advanced fakes… ✤ …are indistinguishable from production services
- 31. A Fake Chat Bot ✤ 61 lines of HIGHLY LEGIBLE bash and jq ✤ Does one thing and does it well ✤ Does NOT provide most chatbot features ✤ Indistinguishable from a chatbot in practice
- 32. ✤ Jenkins plugins are integral. Break HipChat you might break Jenkins! ✤ No matter how hard the bot goes down, you only ever have to debug 61 lines to restore your mission-critical Jenkins status announcements! Why not use a framework?
- 33. A chat bot is a stack
- 35. Jenkins JSON API
- 37. That’s it! It acts like a bot (sort of).
- 38. A New Jersey solution in the wild!
- 40. ✤ Simplicity and design are equally important until you have to pick one; then pick simplicity. ✤ Modern business practices assume that there is no functional upper limit on system complexity. MIT vs. New Jersey! a.k.a “worse is better”
- 41. The BASE tag ✤ Overrides the root URL of an HTML page. ✤ Saturate local HTML pages with production assets!
- 43. Handling plutonium: get ready for it ✤ Eventually your automation will detect a widespread antipattern. ✤ Since your automation made the discovery, you will by definition know the nature of the bug(s) better than anyone else. ✤ It’s SUPER scary to factor out a widespread pattern. ✤ tl;dr: you’ll want to fix it, though it’ll be hard.
- 44. Thanks! ✤ I’ll take a few questions now… ✤ Follow me on twitter: @noahsussman