Practical Pyramid Test

Escalated Testing Pyramid

As a normal software engineer, we always remember the rule of thumb of testing. We always heard the word of the testing pyramid which consists of 3 things :

1. Unit Testing
2. Integration Testing
3. UI Testing

Normal test pyramid

Unit Testing is the foundation of your test suite that will be made up of unit tests. Your unit tests make sure that a certain unit (your subject under test or SUT) of your codebase works as intended. Unit tests have the narrowest scope of all the tests in your test suite. The number of unit tests in your test suite will largely outnumber any other type of test. Normally we test every single function of each class to be able to cover 100% test coverage which is impossible. Below is an example of UT in Swift

func testMultiplication() {
   let a = 4
   let b = 2
   XCTAssert(a * b, 8) 
}

Integration Testing is another testing term for testing the integration or communication between each other component of the application such as database, networking, or another layer of an object that needs to integrate with each other. Here are a good explanation and example of Integration testing in swift by John Sundel.

UI Testing is the last layer which is the layer that facing the end-user directly, in this case, we normally call it as an end to end test. The most non-efficient way yet the most accurate is manual testing for UI Testing since it involves an interaction of human behavior which sometimes leads to the BDD testing concept. We will put our accessibility identifier for each UI Element to be able to detect the target component in automation.

Most of the time all of the basic three testings above are not enough, sometime the application is growing bigger and needs a more maintainable testing approach as well a more concise testing structure. Finally, most of the company try to embrace more testing and find more ways to make testing more precise. Escalation of Testing Pyramid consists of more structure. We can breakdown more into several structures. This is one of the enhanced testing pyramids that I found out. (Order start from the lowest…