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What are unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, and regression tests? What are the differences between them and which tools can I use for each of them?
For example, I use JUnit and NUnit for unit testing and integration testing. Are there any tools for the last two, smoke testing or regression testing?
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Smoke testing is the initial testing process exercised to check whether the software under test is ready/stable for further testing. Regression testing: Regression testing is repeated testing. Whether new software is effected in another module or not. Unit testing: It is a white box testing.
Unit testing means testing individual modules of an application in isolation (without any interaction with dependencies) to confirm that the code is doing things right. Integration testing means checking if different modules are working fine when combined together as a group.
Smoke Tests vs. Both smoke tests and unit tests should be implemented in your build pipeline. Smoke tests should cover high-level end to end functionality, where unit tests should cover single component testing. Both should be present, and one should not replace the other.
Smoke testing is the preliminary check of the software after a build and before a release. This type of testing finds basic and critical issues in an application before critical testing is implemented.
Unit test: Specify and test one point of the contract of single method of a class. This should have a very narrow and well defined scope. Complex dependencies and interactions to the outside world are stubbed or mocked.
Integration test: Test the correct inter-operation of multiple subsystems. There is whole spectrum there, from testing integration between two classes, to testing integration with the production environment.
Smoke test (aka sanity check): A simple integration test where we just check that when the system under test is invoked it returns normally and does not blow up.
Regression test: A test that was written when a bug was fixed. It ensures that this specific bug will not occur again. The full name is "non-regression test". It can also be a test made prior to changing an application to make sure the application provides the same outcome.
To this, I will add:
Acceptance test: Test that a feature or use case is correctly implemented. It is similar to an integration test, but with a focus on the use case to provide rather than on the components involved.
System test: Tests a system as a black box. Dependencies on other systems are often mocked or stubbed during the test (otherwise it would be more of an integration test).
Pre-flight check: Tests that are repeated in a production-like environment, to alleviate the 'builds on my machine' syndrome. Often this is realized by doing an acceptance or smoke test in a production like environment.
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