Approval Testing
There's a specific kind of paralysis that comes with legacy code. You can see the code needs to be refactored — it's a tangle of side effects, global state, and functions that do six things at once. But you can't refactor safely without tests, and
Testing
The ApprovalTests library is the canonical implementation of approval testing, available across Java, .NET, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
Approval Testing
Microservice architectures distribute the blast radius of API changes across multiple teams and deployment pipelines.
Testing
What do you do when you can't write an expected value for your assertion?
Approval Testing
The problem with complex outputs isn't that they're hard to test — it's that the obvious way to test them is wrong.
Testing Strategy
Approval testing is a technique where you test by comparing actual output to a previously "approved" expected output—stored as a file on disk.