Flaky Integration Tests

“The day I started believing in unit tests Well, I don&#x27;t regard unit tests as the one true way. I don&#x27;t enforce people on my team do it my way. When I get compliments on my work, I tend to elaborate and spread my approach. That&#x27;s what I mean by evangelize, not necessarily advocating for a specific criteria to be met.<p>I find that integration tests are usually are flaky, its my personal experience. In fact, at my company, we just decided to completely turn them off because they fail for many reasons and the usual fix is to adjust the test. If you have had a lot of success with them, great. Just for the record, I am not anti-integration or end-to-end test. I think they have a place and just like unit tests shouldn&#x27;t be the default, neither should they.<p>Here are the two most common scenarios where I find integration (usually end-to-end called integration) tests become flaky:<p>1) DateTime, some part of business logic relies on the current date or time and it wasn&#x27;t accounted for.<p>2) Data changes, got deleted, it expired, etc. and the test did not first create everything it needed before running the test.<p>Regarding your points,<p>1) &quot;realism&quot; that is what I referred to as trusting that a unit test is good enough. If it didn&#x27;t go all the way to the database and back did it test your system? In my personal work, I find that pulling the data from a database and supplying it with a mock are the same thing. So it&#x27;s not only real enough for me, but better because I can simulate all kinds of scenarios that wouldn&#x27;t be possible in true end-to-end tests.<p>2) These days the only code that&#x27;s hard to test is from people that are strictly enforcing OOP. Just like any approach in programming, it will have it&#x27;s pros and cons. I rarely go down that route, so testing isn&#x27;t usually difficult for me.<p>3) It&#x27;s just been my personal experience. Like I said, I&#x27;m not anti-integration tests, but I don&#x27;t write very many of them.<p>4) I didn&#x27;t refer to google, just my personal industry experience.<p>5) Enforcing ideal is a waste of time in programming. People only care about what they see when it ships. I just ship better quality code when I unit test my business logic. Some engineers benefit from it, some harm themselves in confusion, not much I can do about it.<p>Most of this is my personal experience, no knock against anyone and I don&#x27;t force my ideals on anybody. I happily share what and why things work for me. I gradually introduce my own learning over time as I am asked questions and don&#x27;t seek to enforce anything.<p>Happy coding!”