In Integration Testing, does it make sense to replace Async process with a Synchronous one for the sake of testing?

Question

In integration tests, asynchronous processes (methods, external services) make for a very tough test code. If instead, I factored out the async part and create a dependency and replace it with a synchronous one for the sake of testing, would that be a "good thing"?

By replacing the async process with a synchronous one, am I not testing in the spirit of integration testing? I guess I'm assuming that integration testing refers to testing close to the real thing.

Answer 1

Nice question.

In a unit test this approach would make sense but for integration testing you should be testing the real system as it will behave in real-life. This includes any asynchronous operations and any side-effects they may have - this is the most likely place for bugs to exist and is probably where you should concentrate your testing not factor it out.

I often use a "waitFor" approach where I poll to see if an answer has been received and timeout after a while if not. A good implementation of this pattern, although java-specific you can get the gist, is the JUnitConditionRunner. For example:

conditionRunner = new JUnitConditionRunner(browser, WAIT_FOR_INTERVAL, WAIT_FOR_TIMEOUT);   

protected void waitForText(String text) {
    try {
        conditionRunner.waitFor(new Text(text));
    } catch(Throwable t) {
        throw new AssertionFailedError("Expecting text " + text + " failed to become true. Complete text [" + browser.getBodyText() + "]");
    }
}