When you are integrating to other people's stacks, then you need a test facility where people can bring systems together, sometimes there are also physical elements that are required.
I work in Automatic Fare Collection (think railway passenger gates, ticket vending, contactless readers, bus driver consoles and readers etc as well as the backends that deal with the fare calculation and payments).
There are usually multiple vendors involved, and even with the best API and interface documentation and individual system testing against the specifications, you still need to bring the entire environment, including the hardware, together.
These ITFs (Integration Test Facilities) tend to be in existence for the life of the systems, including after hardware refreshes etc.
Yes you can test performance with jmeter etc, but sometimes you need 20 people walking in a circle between an entrance gate and an exit gate.
Fair enough, but IMO even a system like this one should have good mock implementations of the system hardware, down to and including a simple simulator for the physical layout of people near the machine.
In past years I wouldn't say that, but these days it's so easy to get an LLM to write something like this plus a quick and dirty visualization.
I'm not saying this can be a replacement for a physical test setup, but it's so much easier to make changes when the tests can just give a clear cut "yes, this acts like you expect" or "no, this is broken."
Comments
When you are integrating to other people's stacks, then you need a test facility where people can bring systems together, sometimes there are also physical elements that are required.
I work in Automatic Fare Collection (think railway passenger gates, ticket vending, contactless readers, bus driver consoles and readers etc as well as the backends that deal with the fare calculation and payments).
There are usually multiple vendors involved, and even with the best API and interface documentation and individual system testing against the specifications, you still need to bring the entire environment, including the hardware, together.
These ITFs (Integration Test Facilities) tend to be in existence for the life of the systems, including after hardware refreshes etc.
Yes you can test performance with jmeter etc, but sometimes you need 20 people walking in a circle between an entrance gate and an exit gate.
Fair enough, but IMO even a system like this one should have good mock implementations of the system hardware, down to and including a simple simulator for the physical layout of people near the machine.
In past years I wouldn't say that, but these days it's so easy to get an LLM to write something like this plus a quick and dirty visualization.
I'm not saying this can be a replacement for a physical test setup, but it's so much easier to make changes when the tests can just give a clear cut "yes, this acts like you expect" or "no, this is broken."