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A comment on Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programmin... by yashap on Monday March 04, 2019 @01:29AM (#19299230)
Although I agree with you in general, integration tests that are really focused on the contract between two services can be pretty easy to debug, ESPECIALLY if you use request ids that are passed between services, and included in every log. It’s often a matter of simply searching for the request id in your logs and quickly seeing what happened.

E2E UI tests are definitely hard to debug though, in most cases. They still have value, but I’m a fan of the “testing pyramid” here. A small number of E2E UI tests, a decently large number of integration tests that each try to test a single contract between 2 services, and a tonne of unit tests to cover sad paths, detailed behaviour, etc.

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Re:Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programmin... by Bahamut on Monday March 04, 2019 @08:07AM (#19300901)
Totally agreed - the problem is when integration tests are used in lieu of what unit tests are for, which has been an increasing trend in the frontend web world I’ve seen, in large part because of UI frameworks not providing the tools to do testing well.
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Re:Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programmin... by yashap on Monday March 04, 2019 @10:36AM (#19302026)
Definitely. E2E UI tests are almost always brittle, flakey and hard to debug, you want a very small number of them just to test really core workflows. Drives me crazy too when I see frontend devs using them like UI unit tests, while writing no actual unit tests.
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