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Title: Mock objects in functional testing
Proposer: Sven Rosvall
Type: Tutorial and case-study
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
Mock objects are great. They simplify testing enormously and are crucial for unit testing. There are many mocking frameworks available for many languages. But most of them are designed only for unit testing. Don't you wish you could use them in functional testing where the system under test, instead of being controlled from the test code, executes in its production-like environment and interacts with other systems in other processes or other servers? You want to test that the configuration for your service/program/whatever-you-call-it is correct and actually communicates via network, message queues etc.

This talk describes how to use some tools available and methods for creating your own framework for letting your system under test communicate with endpoints that mimic an external system that is accessed through different inter-process methods.

These methods are particularly useful in service-oriented-architectures where a component executes in its own process or JVM. We need a test environment that is close to the production environment which unit tests cannot provide but is lighter than the full system test environment and can be executed during development time like unit tests.

The talk draws from the authors experience in the Java world but the methods are general and can be used in an environment.