6

In my college, I learned about Integration testing in which we combine the whole code together and then test it at once after we are done with unit testing.

A few days back, I heard about Jenkins, which says it does Continuous Integration Testing. I read about it and learned that it means that a developer pushes his/her code several times a day to Jenkins for testing instead of sending the code at the end of the day.

I was confused so I went to read about it from Wikipedia but it didn't help. I read the two links below

Integration testing

Continuous integration

ELI5

What does this all mean?

What is the difference between Regular Integration Testing and Continuous Integration Testing?

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

Integration Testing

Integration testing is about taking the units of code developed with unit testing and combine them together into the desired system. It (can) also mean testing software by including dependencies such as database, screen, communication, micro-services, etc. This is as opposed to unit testing something and mocking and stubbing out all the dependencies (basically you assume they work and provide the values you expect in the test).
Sometimes integration testing can be divided into 'local' and 'full'. Local means test the code along with all the other code that it works with for that application (but not outside apps and dependencies). Full means testing the full application with all the code and all the dependencies and services.

Continuous Integration Testing

Continuous Integration Testing is about a development workflow. It means having a remote server running a program such as Jenkins, CircleCI, etc. so that you commit code and test locally first (maybe just run a few unit tests) and then you push the committed code changes (usually in a branch) to the remote server which runs all the tests in the test suite(s), possibly using parallelization for efficiency of time. When changes are merged into master you also push master to the CI server to run the full test suite before deploying the code into production.

I would be amiss if I didn't also mention:

Continuous Delivery

This is a system (actually employed by some large players in the field - yahoo, etc.) to have a 'pipeline' whereby changes by a developer are made and then there are a series of sets of automated tests that will run, each set being triggered by the success of the previous set. If all the sets pass the changes will actually be deployed to production. I've seen this done with 50 changes a day.

Improve this answer
3

In a nutshell:

Jenkins is just one of many servers (others are, for instance, Bamboo or Travis CI) you can use to implement CI/CD/CT.

Integration testing refers to one of the classic software testing levels, in which you typically integrate multiple modules to test their behavior together. However, the exact definition may vary from company to company.

Continuous integration testing simply means the execution of integration tests within the CI/CD/CT pipeline. That is, usually each (committed/pushed) change runs against the integration tests to make sure no side effects have been introduced.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.