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POWhat are the pros and cons of automated Unit Tests vs automated Integration tests?
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copied!<p>Recently we have been adding automated tests to our existing java applications.</p> <p><strong>What we have</strong></p> <p>The majority of these tests are integration tests, which may cover a stack of calls like:-</p> <ol> <li>HTTP post into a servlet</li> <li>The servlet validates the request and calls the business layer</li> <li>The business layer does a bunch of stuff via hibernate etc and updates some database tables</li> <li>The servlet generates some XML, runs this through XSLT to produce response HTML.</li> </ol> <p>We then verify that the servlet responded with the correct XML and that the correct rows exist in the database (our development Oracle instance). These rows are then deleted.</p> <p>We also have a few smaller unit tests which check single method calls.</p> <p>These tests are all run as part of our nightly (or adhoc) builds.</p> <p><strong>The Question</strong></p> <p>This seems good because we are checking the boundaries of our system: servlet request/response on one end and database on the other. If these work, then we are free to refactor or mess with anything inbetween and have some confidence that the servlet under test continues to work.</p> <p>What problems are we likely to run into with this approach?</p> <p>I can't see how adding a bunch more unit tests on individual classes would help. Wouldn't that make it harder to refactor as it's much more likely we will need to throw away and re-write tests?</p>

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