Cadence
Cadence is Uber's open-source workflow engine—the direct predecessor to Temporal. While many teams have migrated to Temporal, Cadence remains widely deployed at scale, and understanding its testing patterns is valuable both for maintaining Cadence codebases and for teams evaluating the migration path to Temporal. This guide
Temporal
Temporal workflows coordinate long-running, fault-tolerant business processes. Testing them requires a different approach than testing regular functions — workflows encode history, run across multiple servers, and must be deterministic across replays. Why Temporal Testing Is Different A Temporal workflow is a durable function that can pause, resume after failures,
Temporal
Temporal and AWS Step Functions both orchestrate distributed workflows. But they differ significantly in how easy they are to test. This comparison covers unit testing, local development, mock support, replay testing, and CI integration. The Core Difference Temporal workflows are code. You write Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript. Tests use
Temporal
Temporal activities are where your workflow touches the outside world — HTTP calls, database writes, email sends. Testing workflows in isolation means replacing activities with mocks that return predictable values without making real external calls. Why Mock Activities Activities in Temporal are the "impure" part of the system — they