How Integration Tests reduce developer fatigue?
Some stakeholders who are not familiar with the value of unit and integration tests might not fully appreciate the peace of mind that it brings to the work of a programmer.? Below is a very simple example of how an integration test can take away the heavy lifting of checking whether our recent changes did not break something that was working before.
The code available here does the following: https://github.com/ansarmuhammad/GitHub_Copilot/blob/main/integration_test.py
1.????? Read from an excel file which has monthly critical code smells for various projects & modules
2.????? Identify whether the critical code smells are increasing or decreasing
3.????? Update the “comments” column
4.????? Write output to a timestamped excel file
We would like to write an integration test that would use a bench-marked excel file which would not change over time.? The integration test would tell us whether we broke anything that was working before.? As we make more changes to our main program to incorporate other business rules and validations, we can rest assured that the integration test will inform us if we have broken the logic for the initial part.
The two excel files used in the program can be downloaded here:
Closing note:
Sometimes the strain of testing and retesting your recent changes creates a lot of fatigue that affects productivity throughout the day.? Unit tests and integration tests are helpful in taking that workload away.? Let the computer check your work ??!
Good news! GitHub Copilot is very good in this area...