Stryker.NET VS testcontainers-dotnet

Bogus - For creating fake data Verify - Snapshot testing for .NET MELT - For testing ILogger usage Stryker - Mutation Testing for .NET TestContainers - run docker programmatically in integration tests

This is called mutation testing btw.

Let's try it on our small example using Stryker.

There are tools that do this automatically, stryker[2] is one of them. When you run stryker, it will create many mutant versions of your production code, and run your tests for each mutant (that's how mutations are called in stryker's' documentation) version of the code. If your tests fail then the mutant is killed. If your tests passed, the mutant survived. Let's have a look at the the result of runnning stryker against reffects-store's code:

Mutation testing is pretty solid. Better than code coverage for sure. Using Stryker personally.

A mutation testing tool (like Stryker) runs your unit tests to verify they all pass then makes a small change (mutation) to your code and reruns the tests. At least one test should fail because the modified code should behave differently.

I haven't tried it yet, but last time I researched it, this is the library that looked most promising: https://stryker-mutator.io/

Website: https://stryker-mutator.io/

Testcontainers

Like others said, it's better to test with an actual database. I recommend using Testcontainers (https://dotnet.testcontainers.org), you can even create multiple instances so your tests can run in parallel independently.

To launch a container in code we will use Testcontainers. Testcontainers is a library that is built on top of the .NET Docker remote API and provides a lightweight implementation to support your test environment in all circumstances. This library supports pre-defined packages for containers or you can use your .dockerfile. We will use a pre-defined package for LocalStak. LocalStack is a cloud service emulator that runs in a single container for AWS service. LocalStack supports a growing number of AWS services.

Bogus - For creating fake data Verify - Snapshot testing for .NET MELT - For testing ILogger usage Stryker - Mutation Testing for .NET TestContainers - run docker programmatically in integration tests

.NET Shop using SQL Server here, but I think something similar to what we do can apply to any stack. We use TestContainers [1] to spin up a container with SQL Server engine running on it. Then use FluentMigrator [2] to provision tables and test data to run XUnit integration tests against. This has worked remarkably well.

[1] https://dotnet.testcontainers.org/