Cautionary Tales in Integration Testing

Integration tests are often rife with pitfalls that can result in confusing, flaky, or otherwise completely unmaintainable tests. Those pitfalls can often be mitigated by testing in containers, as this usually provides the most straightforward path to creating ephemeral test environments. Containerized tests typically provide isolation and reproducibility, but they can be costly to initially set up, especially if the system under test is not built for a containerized environment. Nonetheless, there are many benefits to containerized testing, even if the system under test won’t ultimately be run in containers in production. In this talk, Ryan will discuss some of the issues that are commonly encountered when building integration tests, as well as those faced when moving existing test setups to a containerized environment.  In addition, Ryan will speak about some approaches to take if you find yourself having to deal with difficult-to-maintain integration tests and some ways to repair them without rewriting the whole world.