[almighty] Approach for writing unit tests for Github OAuth2.0 auth

[Thomas Mäder]

Hi Shoubhik,

I think both kinds of test have their place. If we want to verify that 
our code does what we want it to do (tests as specification), it makes a 
lot of sense to test very specific interactions. Since OAuth is 
basically a sequence of requests to our server, there really isn't a 
need to "mock" anything: it's just a sequence of http requests where we 
need to check the proper responses. I would want this test to work 
without needing anything outside my local machine, so that I can work 
when I'm offline.

However, in the wild, many things may go wrong: it might be as stupid as 
a corporate firewall filtering out some headers from requests. Also, our 
test might not accurately represent the behaviour of Github OAuth in 
every detail. Having that safety net seems valuable to me. It may be 
hard to cover every use case in these tests. We may want to start with 
covering 1-2 basic flows and add more as regression tests as we go along.

What I think is important for productivity is that I can run all the 
local tests while I am developing in a simple way.

just my 0.02€

/Thomas


On 10/12/2016 05:55 PM, Shoubhik Bose wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> This is an extension to a discussion we were having about what would 
> be the apt approach to write tests for Github authentication on the 
> alm core ( backend ).
>
> We've written a bunch of tests which checks if our code does the 
> Github OAuth flow correctly.
>
> However the alternate school of thought is:
>
> Should we have a 'mock' Github OAuth provider to also test our code, 
> since conventionally tests should not be depending on external systems.
>
> On the flip-side, if test failures are not caught with a real Github 
> OAuth provider we might ending up chasing bugs in production.
>
> Let me know your thoughts.
>
>
> -
> Shoubhik
>
>
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