Going Beyond Unit Tests in a Serverless Architecture

Testing is often cited as a challenge of Serverless. Unit tests are easy. Integration tests are hard.

Maria and David will share their journey at Cambia, going beyond writing unit tests to explore the implementation of automated user acceptance tests for serverless components.

They are a few years into their journey applying the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology, which uses plain-English user acceptance tests to assert the business requirements of the component. They are using Gherkin as a requirements process and the Cucumber framework to implement the tests. This served them well in regards to developing microservices hosting REST APIs, but when the pair initially began adopting a Serverless Architecture they had to reevaluate our BDD strategy.

Fundamental to their new strategy is the open source project LocalStack, which enables them to write more natural black box user acceptance tests for our Serverless components.

David and Maria will give a brief introduction to each of the tools used to achieve this (Gherkin, Cucumber, LocalStack), and walk through a practical example putting them all together.

About Cambia: Cambia's cause is to catalyze and transform health care, creating a person-focused and economically sustainable health care system. One of the ways that they are accomplishing this is by building a platform which empowers software developers with healthcare tools, APIs, and data to develop secure, compliant, and useful applications for the healthcare consumer.

About the speakers:

Maria Ovsyankina works as a Software Engineer at Cambia Health Solutions. She started her career as an electrical engineer but moved to software after a couple of years in the industry. She likes learning about analog photography and mushroom foraging.

David Knepprath is a Software Developer at Cambia Health. He began his career studying Social Science and working at non-profits until he read The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick. This ignited a career changing passion for using software for social good.

Schedule:

Doors Open at 5:45 p.m.
Programming to begin at 6:15 p.m. with Q&A after.

Drinks and Light Snacks will be served.

Interested in speaking at a future event? Message us and let us know! We'd love to have you.