Iteratively test your integration flows using IBM App Connect Designer
Tags: cloudpakforintegration, ibm, mappingassist, ai
Published: 2021-03-15 12:02:57

Testing strategies is a topic of great interest and building out a comprehensive suite of automated tests with focus on test-driven development (TDD) helps organization ensure longevity of their integration flows. It includes unit and integration tests. 

This traditional approach of test-driven development was sufficient when project plan and requirements were gathered and locked during the start of integration project and good number of integration developers were assigned to the project from months to year timeline for project completion.  

With advent of Agile methodology there has been drastic change in how projects are planned, resource allocated and execution of the project. Some of notable changes: 

1- Full requirements are not known in advance and it keeps evolving so development cycle is reduced into bi-weekly/monthly iterations 
2- Resource allocation has become a challenge and bare minimum integration developers are assigned to execute the tasks under stringent timelines 
3- Not all user have required skill set. Line of business users, ad-hoc integrator are working heavily on integration these days and expect tools to be intelligent to help them solve the problem with minimal efforts

IBM App Connect Designer solves exactly that and let you build integration flows very quickly. Its award-winning browser-based UI is designed to make developers more productive and let you build your end to end integration flow in minutes with ZERO training.  

What about testing? Since there are no more dedicated team for testing; developers are expected to write the integration flows along with all necessary tests. 

With the adoption of Continuous Integration, continuous changes to integration asset makes it even more difficult for developers to maintain test suites. Now consider task which need to be undertaken by an integration developer
New version of message flows are built for changes like- 

1- Change in flow logic like adding new IF logic 
2- Adding new application or upgrading to new version of application for new features
3- Change in business object schema of application 
4- Changing flow configuration like retry mechanism
5- Splitting flows into sub flows for efficient handling 

Imagine the effort & pain developer need to put in to keep delivering on these tasks. No doubt developer spends more time in maintaining and enhancing their integration test suites rather than core development. TDD also need people with certain expertise skill set and its not well suited for all business users. This has renewed focus on iterative test-during development  to capture bugs early in development cycle. 

Iterative testing of integration flows is an immediate confidence booster and can go long way in enabling developers to be more efficient. It let developers get early feedback and also helps newbie developer to get their hands dirty for building quick integration flows.  

Testing in iterative manner involves:

1- Testing the complex transformations in maps 
2- Testing integration nodes in isolation 
3- Testing end to end integration flows 

Also, developers need to generate robust sample data for above test cases .IBM App Connect Designer let you tackle all the above cases with great simplicity and speed.  


**Testing the complex transformations in map** 

You define complex transformation using JSONata and IBM App Connect Designer let you test your JSONata mappings in the flow editor by providing sample data without need to deploy your flow. You can do all this in fraction of time it takes with traditional tooling. Let us see one example 

[![](http://img.youtube.com/vi/zidkrMwPCQI/0.jpg)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zidkrMwPCQI "Testing the complex transformations in map- IBM App Connect Designer")

  

**Testing integration nodes in isolation** 

Traditional integration tools also have features to test individual nodes, but effort needed to test a node is high and generating sample data discourage developers from these tests since enterprise application have too many fields and understanding metadata of these fields is time consuming exercise 

IBM App Connect let you test a single action node in the flow easily by providing sample data to the previous node fields. It also provides a feature to generate sample data in intelligent manner for all your map fields with single click. This takes away pain of manual generation of sample data and enable developers to test the node on the fly with different set of auto-generated data which also helps in capturing boundary of test data. Let us see one example  

[![](http://img.youtube.com/vi/2qmMdMmUHDo/0.jpg)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qmMdMmUHDo "Testing integration nodes in isolation - IBM App Connect Designer")

**Testing end to end integration flows**

You can also test an entire flow without deploying it with a single click. You also have goodness of generating sample data as explained in previous section. Let us see one example   

[![](http://img.youtube.com/vi/M8iDJyA2lLo/0.jpg)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iDJyA2lLo "Testing end to end integration flows - IBM App Connect Designer")



**Summary** 

This article explained how developer can iteratively build and test their integration flow with zero training in few seconds.

Try our managed service free trial here.[Link](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/app-connect/get-started)

You can also try out these cool features with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration [Link](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-pak-integration?topic=cloud-pak-integration-trial)


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