Understanding Software

Integration Testing

This is where you take two or more full "components" of a system and specifically test how they behave when "put together." A component could be a code module, a library that your system depends on, a remote service that provides you data – essentially any part of the system that can be conceptually isolated from the rest of the system.

For example, in a web application where creating an account sends the new user an email, one might have a test that runs the account creation code (without going through a web page, just exercising the code directly) and checks that an email was sent. Or one might have a test that checks that account creation succeeds when one is using a real database – that "integrates" account creation and ...