Spock VS Pact JVM

I love using the Spock framework for its simplicity, readability, and maintainability. That's why we use Spock to drive our integration tests.

Well I care a lot that it exists. And many other people I know do as well. Just because you don't seem to like it, you shouldn't imagine everyone else is like you.

Maybe Grails is no longer used as much (like Rails itself), but Groovy found other usages since then, like https://spockframework.org/ and Jenkins pipelines (https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/). It's not going anywhere, and I see no reason for anyone to be upset about it.

In my opinion it is Spock for Java/Groovy [1]. The amount of functionality and readability you can squeeze from Groovy's DSLesque is absurd. Is basically a full fledged new test language with Java sprinkled as the test contents code

[1]: https://spockframework.org/

Groovy allows you to perform transforms on it's AST. If you look at the Spock framework, they used AST transforms to pull off a lot of the DSL.

Spock and Cucumber exemplify the philosophy of behavior-driven development (BDD). The principle behind BDD is that you must first define the desired result of the added feature in a subject-oriented language before writing any tests. The developers are then given the final documentation.

As a quick demonstration, the following (Spock) test asserts that the client JVM code fails to create an SSL connection with the service. Note that I chose to use Vert.x Web Client to handle interacting with the service, but don't let this decision distract from the core content of this post. Nevertheless, if you haven't used Vert.x, I encourage you to try it out -- especially for building server-side network applications.

API Contract Testing might be worth exploring. Gives you the ability to run it quickly locally or in CI/CD. A centralized way to validate if your changes broke another service might also be interesting. That series of videos from the same team is gold: https://docs.pact.io

We use Pact for contract testing https://docs.pact.io/

The introduction here is quite good: https://docs.pact.io/

Pact.Net documentation: https://docs.pact.io/ Mountebank documentation: http://www.mbtest.org/ The Microsoft.AspNetCore.TestHost package on GitHub: https://github.com/aspnet/AspNetCore/tree/main/src/Testing/Microsoft.AspNetCore.TestHost

There's also https://docs.pact.io/ but I haven't had time yet to really look into it but probably someone else can tell something about it.

This PoC shows a step by step implementation of contract testing using Pact.

Contract tests assert that inter-application messages conform to a shared understanding documented in a contract. Without contract testing, the only way to ensure that applications will work correctly together is by using expensive and brittle integration tests.

If you are updating your API based on user feedback, you can work with your team or stakeholders to build an API contract describing how your API should function. You can use JSON schemas to document your API’s endpoint response codes and set up the contract. The contract must be accepted by all parties. Then, any changes made to the API must pass the contract test before being approved. Contract testing can be automated and incorporated into your CI/CD pipeline. Contract testing tools include Pact and Spring Cloud Contract.

Pact.

I have contract tests (https://docs.pact.io/) to ensure the integration works.