Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins

Integration/acceptance testing

Integration and acceptance tests usually use the test/staging database, which should be as similar as possible to the production. One approach, taken by many companies, is to snapshot the production data into staging that guarantees that it is exactly the same. This approach, however, is treated as an anti-pattern for the following reasons:

• Test isolation: Each test operates on the same database, so the result of one test may influence the input of the others
• Data security: Production instances usually store sensitive information and are therefore better secured
• Reproducibility: After every snapshot, the test data is different, which may result in flaky tests

For the preceding reasons, the preferred approach ...