next Acceptance Testing
up Functionality-Oriented Quality
previous Unit Testing
  Contents
PDF version   PostScript version

Integration Testing

Integration testing aims at the validation of the class collaboration model and of the system's architecture. It is not uncommon to find out at this (late) stage that the system's parts do not work in a satisfactory fashion together. For this reason the XP methodology (see [*]) recommends that daily integration tests be undertaken.
As already outlined, the process followed during the development phase involved building a fully tested and integrated--although partially functional--daily release. For instance, the first development stage was to create a fully tested system skeleton, with a client module capable of sending a fixed HTTP request message and a server module able to echo the message back to the client, thanks to the NullPort class. The non-trivial architecture, involving both subsystems, the application server, and the servlet engine was thus validated. In the next release, SOAP message generation was added, followed by SOAP interpretation in yet another release, etc. At a stage, the dummy NullPort class was replaced by the Port class to support actual Web services.
next Acceptance Testing
up Functionality-Oriented Quality
previous Unit Testing
  Contents

Copyright © 2001 Jean-Marc Rosengard