pact-js VS Karate

First, he shows the official pact.io websites. Then, he clicks on the “View on Github” button by selecting Node JS and Javascript from the list of options.

It just just enough abstraction over the basics of converting your HTTP calls to GraphQL queries and mutations, but ALL of the parsing of responses is on you. I’m well versed in parsing JSON in Elm. I’m also familiar with the compiler errors as well as runtime errors you get with JSON that doesn’t match up to what you designed. At some point I’ll probably have to move beyond the unit tests and add contact tests, maybe via Pact.js.

> I also wasn't aware that "unit" referred to an isolated test, not to the SUT.

I'm with you. That claim is unsubstantiated. It seems to trace to the belief that the first unit tests were XUnit family, thus were SUnit for Scheme. But Kent Beck made it pretty clear that SUnit "units" were classes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150315073817/http://www.xprogr...

There were unit tests before that. SUnit took its name from common parlance, not vice versa. It was a strange naming convention, given that the unit testing framework could be used to test anything and not just units. Much like the slightly older Test Anything Protocol (TAP) could.

> [on unit tests] This does lead to a lot of work maintaining them whenever the implementation changes, but this is a necessary chore because of the value they provide.

I disagree. Unit tests can still be behavioral. Then they change whenever the behavior changes. They should still work with a mere implementation change.

> This is why I still think that the traditional test pyramid is the best model to follow.

I'll disagree a little with that, too. I think a newer test pyramid that uses contract testing to verify integrations is better. The notion of contract tests is much newer than the pyramids and, properly applied, can speed up feedback by orders of magnitude while also cutting debugging time and maintenance by orders of magnitude.

On that front, I love what Pact is doing and would like to see more competition in the area. Hottest thing in testing since Cypress/Playwright . . .

https://pact.io

I've worked in places where Pact [0] was used for testing services developed by different teams (external) and teams themselves (internal)

[0] https://pact.io/

I'd never heard anyone call those "integrity tests" before. I think "contract test" is more common.

Assuming I understood you, that is.

I've been telling everyone to look at Pact to make contract testing easier to organize and maintain and to make it easier to trigger in the other tests in CI when an interface's behavior changes. They haven't offered me a commission yet. ;-)

https://pact.io

We use pact and since introducing it we have significantly increased velocity and reduced test cycles as it catches things very early. For system tests we hand write them using whatever test frameworks the team is used to.

There is also Pact https://pact.io/ for a language agnostic pact testing.

When you wish to focus on the contract ( which kind of field is required, ...), you shoud use contract testing frameworks. As you seem to leverage a microservices, a consumer driven contract testing approach with a framework like Pact.js is recommended.

This is why we need better tools which will give benefits for the added complexity. If you need to create both the feature files AND the code, it's just complexity with little benefits. But frameworks like https://github.com/karatelabs/karate or https://github.com/Endava/cats are hiding this complexity and remove the code layer entirely. Which, in my view, this is where you need to be in 2023, particularly for API testing.

- https://insomnia.rest/ - https://hoppscotch.io/ - https://github.com/karatelabs/karate - https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman

Congrats on the launch ! I'm the lead dev of [Karate](https://github.com/karatelabs/karate) and was wondering if you had come across it. I strongly agree that collaboration should be [via Git](https://www.karatelabs.io/first-class-citizens) and the IDE and traditional solutions fall short. I hope Karate's syntax passes your "memory friendly" test :) We get regular feedback is that it is easy to read and even non-programmers can pick it up. One thing I feel we do really well is chaining of HTTP requests. And we have plugins for [IntelliJ](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/19232-karate) and [VS Code](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=karatela...).

Maintaining a tool like this as open-source is hard, all the best !

FWIW https://github.com/karatelabs/karate is 83% Java.

We use karate to test our fully integrated graphql backend. Has Gherkin language support.

Try Karate

Take a look at Karate.