5 best practices for integration testing

What is integration testing?

It is a software testing technique where individual components or units of code are tested to validate interactions among different software system modules. In this process, the system components are either tested as a single group or organized iteratively. The main aim of this test is to ensure that all the units of the software work fine after combining.

Why are the different approaches to integration testing?

Below mentioned are different approaches that can be followed to perform this test:

1. Big bang approach– In this approach, almost all of the units or major units are combined and tested in one-go.
2. Incremental testing approach – This approach includes testing a minimum of two related modules. The modules are summed up and tested to achieve proper functioning
3. Top-down approach – This testing approach includes testing of top unit levels first and then moving to lower unit levels
4. Bottom-up approach–In this approach lower unit levels are tested first and then upper levels are tested
5. Hybrid approach - It is the combination of the top-down and bottom-up approach

What are the best practices of integration testing?

1. Perform integration test after unit test – In unit testing the individual units of the software are tested in isolation. After the units are tested, these units are integrated and tested to ensure proper integration, Therefore this test has to be performed after the completion of the unit test
2. Do not test business logic with integration test – Integration tests take more time as compared to unit tests. Thus it is advisable to use unit test for testing the business logic as unit test checks the basic correctness of code.
3. Maintain separate test suites - Integration tests should not be run together with unit tests. By keeping test suites separate developers can run unit tests during development and before committing code
4. Log extensively - Unit tests have very limited scope and tests very small pieces of the application, thus, it is very easy to find the reason if the test fails. But integration test is quite complex and different and its scope may span several software modules, thus it requires exhaustive logging to analyze failure and to discover underlying problems
5. Integration testing is not the last stop – It is important to not just stop at integration testing, rather go beyond it. As your software will be deployed in a complete production ecosystem that may include virtualization tools, databases, mail servers, load balancers, DNS servers, proxy servers, and more. Thus it is important to test all these components and to ensure that the system accurately simulates the production environment.

Conclusion: Enterprises all across the globe wants to achieve quality software that satisfies their customer to fullest. To achieve this enterprises validate that before their applications are released to the market, they are tested with the best software testing practices. To do so, enterprises adopt integration testing which is an important stage in the software development life cycle. However, there are certain best practices as mentioned in this article that should be kept in mind while performing this test. Leverage integration testing from a next-gen QA and software testing service provider to get high-quality, well-integrated software.