Hi group, Apologies for the somewhat cryptic subject line - I'll try to explain... Apologies also for the length of the post, but I'm sure others will hit the same problem if they haven't already done so, and hopefully this discussion will help them find a way out of a sticky situation.
We've got a (notionally agile) Clojure app under heavy development. The project itself follows the Agile Manifesto to a degree, but is constrained in having to interface with other applications that are following a waterfall process. Yep, it's awkward, but that's not what I'm asking about. Simplifying it as much as possible, we started with a pre-existing, somewhat clunky, Java app, then extended the server side extensively using Clojure, and added a web client. There's loads of (non-Clojure) supporting infrastructure - database cluster, queue servers, identity management, etc. At any point, we've got multiple streams of Clojure development going on, hitting different parts of the app. The web client development is "traditional" in that it's not using ClojureScript, and probably won't in the foreseeable future. As mentioned above, a key point is that the app has a significant requirement to interface to legacy systems - other Java apps, SAP, Oracle identity management stack and so on. >From a testing perspective, for this app we've got unit tests written in Clojure/midje which are maintained by the app developers (as you'd expect). These work well and midje is a good fit for the app. However, given all the various infrastructure requirements of the app, it's hard to see how we can use midje to go all the way up the testing stack (unit -> system -> integration -> pre-production -> production). >From the web client perspective, we've got UI automation tests written using Ruby/Capybara, a toolset which I suspect was chosen based on the existing skillset of the pool of testers. Again this works well for us. The problem is with the "middle ground" between the two extremes of unit and UI testing - our glaring problem at present is with integration testing, but there's also a smaller problem with system testing. We're struggling to find an approach that works here, given the skillsets we have on hand - fundamentally, we've got a (small) pool of developers who know Clojure, a (small) pool of testers who know Ruby, and a larger pool of testers who do primarily non-automated testing. In an ideal world, we'd probably use Clojure for all automated testing. It seems relatively straightforward to use Stuart Sierra's component library (https://github.com/stuartsierra/component) to mock out infrastructure components such as databases, queues, email servers etc., and doing so would let us address our system-level testing. On the integration front, we could conceivably also leverage the same component library to manage the state of all the various infrastructure components that the app depends on, and thus ensure that we had a suitably production-like environment for integration testing. This would be a non-trivial piece of work. Our big problem really boils down to just not having enough skilled Clojure people available to the project. You could point to any of the following areas that are probably common to any non-trivial Clojure application: either we don't have enough Clojure developers to address the various requirements of system and integration testing, or our techops guys don't have the necessary skills to expose a Clojure/component interface to the various test/development environments, or our testers don't know Clojure and not willing to take the word of developers that their Clojure tests are both fit for purpose and sufficient from a risk management perspective. Obvious options, none of which seem great: - hire more Clojure people (expensive, as they're still pretty rare) and put them to work in testing & techops. We've tried turning some of our Clojure devs into techops already, but strangely devs who've taken the time and had the initiative to learn Clojure don't like doing techops work. What a surprise ;-> I suspect the same would apply if we tried turning them into testers - retrain our testers so they can write automated tests in Clojure. That would be quite a stretch for our testers, and I'd suggest it would be the same for most testers out there (otherwise they'd probably be working as developers). Another factor is career development: once testers start to move on from this project, what is the chance that "Clojure" will be a useful thing to have on their CVs? - retrain techops people so they can wrap up and expose their infrastructure using Clojure components, making it available in such a way that it would better support integration and systems testing. Same problems here as with retraining testers to use Clojure - enforce the use of :pre and :post conditions in all our Clojure code, to bring in a "design by contract" approach and try to reduce the "surprises" that occur during integration of different streams of work. Aside from being a sizeable piece of work to do this, we're stuck with a strong reliance on the pre-existing Java app and I can't see a way of reducing the integration risk of this element - use something other than Clojure (e.g. Ruby) for systems and integration testing, so we could leverage the existing skillsets of our test workforce. This is probably conceivable if we made the effort to expose much of the functionality of the app using something like REST APIs, but it would require a significant investment in time and would have no likely future benefit beyond making it easier to test. I realise that's a desirable aim in itself, but it's a hard sell to the people who pay the bills! I'll go out on a limb and suggest that, as of late 2014, probably any non-trivial Clojure project doesn't have enough skilled Clojure people on board to cover all the testing and operational requirements for the project. How then are you addressing the non-development requirements of your project that require Clojure expertise - especially testing and devops? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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