Why is Integration Testing important in Software Testing Life Cycle?
In our testing environment, most of the companies and organization focuses on end-to-end testing. Well, end-to-end testing is necessary, but it needs to cover the real use cases. Most of the testers spent 80% of the time finding basic bugs rather than working on the actual use cases.
With the right testing strategy and release plan, in the real world, there is always less time or no time for testing real-time use cases.
Most of the industry and organization have adapted only to the Unit testing and Functional testing. It’s some of the organization that has the Integration testing in the testing life cycle.
Integration testing is an approach where modules are developed, and testing of modules always starts at the finest level of the programming hierarchy and continues towards the lower levels. It’s the extension of unit testing. Integration testing takes a smaller unit of unit testing and tests their behavior as the whole.
Most of the testing life cycles primarily rely on end to end testing. It’s important and must to have an end to end testing. But at the same time, it’s important to have Integration Test suites in the software testing life cycle.
Some of the experiences and advantages of the Integration Testing
- Be it top down or bottom up approach of Integration Testing, the testing starts at the very early stages of development and bugs are caught earlier rather than late in the cycle.
- Confidence in the development cycle is high.
- Easy to integrate with daily builds and easy to test in development environment
- Creating the right test gives precise feedback loop mechanism between both developers and test engineers.
- Tests run faster compared to end to end tests.
- Code Coverage is higher and easy to track.
- Most of the unit test cases, negative cases, and simpler cases can be written at the earlier stages and gets executed on every build. Helps in better test coverage too and improves test gaps.
- Tests are more reliable and easy to isolate the failures.
- Majorly helps to build real-time use cases during the end to end testing.
- Integration tests catch system-level issues, such as a broken database schema, mistaken cache integration, and so on.
What does it require to have integration testing?
- Most importantly it requires Developer with Tester’s attitude.
- Management encouragement to build strong Test team who would work and think like a tester with development skill sets.
- Test Automation Developers need to think beyond writing test after the product built but at very early stage of development.
- Test are written from the day one of the development cycles
Always recommend writing good tests and every engineer to test their code. It is important to be disciplined programmer who doesn’t deliver test but delivers robust test suite!