Reminder to Self — Building Integration Tests Early in library development will prevent rewrites of systems

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

When building a large piece of software — especially a library intended to be used by others, it is best to do integration tests early to confirm that the systems actually make sense working together. Many times what seemed to make sense in isolation, makes no sense when put into a real scenario.

Spent the better part of the last month writing some systems that made perfect sense in isolation. Unit tests showed that they were working fine and the performance was good. Then I created some integration tests to pull the systems together and found that the integrations actually didn’t make sense being integrated together when using the software as a regular user/developer would use it. Ended up scrapping the old approach altogether rather than half-assing a cludge.

It was the right thing to do.

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash