Testing systems with external dependencies: problems, solutions, Mountebank

When it comes to modern IT system development, the question of external dependencies mocking is always there. External service may not be available at the moment, or it may be being developed concurrently so you can't really count on it. This question is especially pressing when you're writing autotests, because you need to test not only the system's usual behaviour, but also the exceptional circumstances: cases when external service is not available or returns an error, and so on.

In this talk, Andrey will show how to solve these problems with mocking, share best practices of using mocks in manual and auto testing, explain how to embed mock system into an auto testing framework.

On previous Heisenbugs mocking has already been touched upon, but that talk was about the speaker's own mocking tool for internal use, not available to the QA community. Andrey, however, is going to back up his theory with practical use of Mountebank, an open source tool which everybody can access.

Andrey will show how to use Mountebank in test framework written in Python, but the talk is not limited to Python users: testers using other languages will also be able to employ this tool in their projects.