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It's a 4yr old application ... Now, we need to be able to do systematic system testing ... without having to build hooks into the code or manually following every path

Uh oh. Four years into an applications lifecycle is a bit late to discover system testing. Are there unit tests for subsystems, or are you trying to avoid having to restructure the code to make unit tests work?

My preference is to start with unit testing each subsystem, using mock objects as necessary to isolate subsystems from each other. If you wait until everything is assembled until trying to test, the tests are harder to write, since they have to set up and tear down a known environment (e.g., resetting the database configuration to a fixed starting point).

chromatic has a good article on using mock objects to test. See A Test::MockObject Illustrated Example.

Can you say more about the reluctance to build "hooks" into the existing code?

In reply to Re: System testing a WWW transaction application by dws
in thread System testing a WWW transaction application by dragonchild

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