The Agile Way: Integration Testing vs Functional Testing or both? [closed]

Answer 1

I would say (and this is just a matter of opinion) that your Functional tests are your true tests. Ie those tests that actually simulate real-life usage of your application. For this reason, never get rid of them, no matter what.

It sounds like you have a decent system going. Keep it all if you have nothing to lose.

Answer 2

I tend not to separate various flavours of testing in TDD. For me TDD is Test-Driven Development, not Unit Test-Driven Development. So my TDD practice combines unit tests, integration tests, functional and acceptance tests. This results in some components being covered by certain types of tests and others components being covered by other types of tests in a very pragmatic fashion.

I have asked a question about the relevance of this practice and the short answer was that in practice the separation is between fast/simple tests run automatically at every build and slow/complex tests run less often.

Answer 3

My company does functional testing but not unit or integration testing. Im trying to encourage we adopt them, i see them as encouraging better design and a faster indication that all is well. Do you need unit tests if you do functional testing?

Answer 4

We have experienced that a solid set of selenium tests actually sums up what the customer expects of quality really well. So, in essence we've been having this discussion: If writing selenium tests was as easy as writing unit tests we should focus less on unit tests.

And if there is a bug somewhere that does not have any consequence in the application, who really cares? But there's always the issues surrounding real-life complexities; are you sure your functional tests are capturing the correct scenarios ? There may be underlying complexities caused by other systems that are not directly visible in the behavior of the application.

In reality, writing selenium tests (using a proper programming language, not selenese) does get really simple and fun once you drill through the initial problems. But we're not willing to give up our unit tests quite yet....

Answer 5

You should do all of them because unit,integration and functional testing all serve different purposes.
Belongs to me an important point is that the way write test is very important and TDD is not enought, BDD (behavior driven development) give a good approach...

Answer 6

I liken unit testing as making sure the words in a paragraph are spelled correctly. Functional testing is like making sure the paragraph makes sense, and flows well within the document it's living within.