Why Coverage Metrics Fail and System Tests Win
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An airhacks.fm conversation with Stanislav Bashkyrtsev about: discussion about testing terminology and the difference between unit tests, component tests, System Tests, and integration tests, defining component tests as in-process invocations without HTTP, using RestAssured with MockMvc-style direct endpoint calls, avoiding mocks in favor of real system tests, why code coverage is a misused management metric, the anti-pattern of using reflection to inflate coverage, distinguishing line and branch coverage from actual verification, using coverage from system tests to detect dead code for pruning, mutation testing with PIT to measure assertion quality, testing Quarkus applications, the default Guice and Guava dependencies in Quarkus RESTEasy, starting a new microservice with a separate system-test module, calling endpoints over HTTP with the MicroProfile REST Client or the Java HTTP client, deploying Quarkus on AWS Lambda as a production-like environment, backward compatibility testing with multiple production versions, turning system tests into stress and load tests, testing connection pools and metrics under load, introducing a test-only private API to verify state changes in serverless systems, contract-driven work in large consulting projects, generating JSON and JSONB directly in PostgreSQL and returning it over JDBC, mapping database rows to Java records instead of DTOs, running GraalVM inside the Oracle Database for stored procedures and table triggers, the pendulum between database-centric and application-centric logic, the convergence of SQL and NoSQL databases, CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and manual production deployment steps, avoiding Jenkins access to production via CGI shell scripts behind nginx, AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild with CDK-defined infrastructure, event-driven pipelines triggered by S3 put-object events, multi-account roles with short-lived STS credentials, the size of the AWS SDK and reducing it by excluding unused HTTP clients, health checks and Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes, why health checks make little sense for short-lived Lambdas, a version endpoint for deployment smoke tests
Stanislav Bashkyrtsev on twitter: @sbashkirtsev