Testing with Moxy

Overview
Build proxies that pass through most requests, but create mock results on well-known data.

Our situation
We needed to be able to verify the behavior for error conditions from our Selenium (web) tests. We had already created mock services that would return these results. We then had to manage when we connected to which endpoint, which put the expectation about behavior outside the test and in the server configuration. In order to do a single regression pass, we had to stop and reconfigure the server.

Our solution
We created Moxies (mock proxies), which most of the time are just a plain passthrough to the real endpoint from our vendors' test systems. For a well known set of data (addresses in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma) the Moxy returns error conditions. Those addresses and their expectations are defined in a single class, shared both by the Moxy implementation and the tests.

Benefits
Test real success and mock failure in same server configuration.
Data and its expectation is in sync (shared classes).
Code is explicit about which tests depend on which Moxies, and which specific behaviors.

Future
With the same solution we expect to create a set of test cases that do not rely on the availability of the vendor test systems, based on similar conventions. (Eureka, CA)

Other implementations
We considered using wrapper objects injected via Spring to accomplish the same thing with less monkeying around with endpoints. This would avoid needing to deploy a real http mock service, and avoid issues around certificate verification and authentication. However, an injected solution would require deploying the mock software on all the client machines, and tweaking its configuration so that the wrapper bean is injected in our test environment, but not production. The injection solution also doesn't test the parsing of the error response, though that should probably be done in unit tests anyway.

If we were using a ESB like Mule, we could have configured Mule to redirect the requests based on the data, and used our mock services unchanged, and the test system configuration also unchanged.

Some solutions avoid having to use key data in the request object by manipulating http header info instead. This wasn't an option for us, unless we create some kind of signal for that header all the way through to our public pages. That seemed too invasive for our situation.

Closing
It works for us, and has a cool name*. What more could you want?

* Yes, you could probably more accurately describe this as a decorator. But Mockorator isn't nearly so awesome a name.