On Integration Testing

[Emanuele D'Arrigo]

Hi everybody,

I just finished unit-testing a couple of tightly related modules and
it's now time to test them together to a) check if they do talk to
each other in the ways they should, b) check how fast they can talk to
each other. The problem? Well, the problem is that potentially they
can have some pretty varied conversations!! There are a lot of
different messages that they can exchange, from simple question-answer
messages to more complex [initial request, confirmation requested,
confirmation sent, final response, public announce] sequences of
messages. All this in a one-to-many context, that is one module is
effectively a server and can be connected to zero to N clients.

Right now I do not have a particularly cohesive, consistent approach
to this type of testing. In short, I've never done it before. I'll
start with some simple tests, i.e. adding and removing clients and
sending some simple sequences of messages, maybe pushing up the number
of clients to see how much gets done in, say, a second. But it feels
fairly "unscientific". =)

I've already googled "integration testing" and I'm in the process of
reading a variety of articles. Is there any one that the people of the
python community would like to recommend?

Manu