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LetsGit.IT/Categories/Monoliths
Monolithsmedium

How do you approach integration testing in a monolith without making CI too slow?

Tags
#testing#monolith#ci#integration-tests
Back to categoryPractice quiz

Answer

Follow a test pyramid: many fast unit tests, fewer integration tests, and a small number of end-to-end tests. For integration, test important seams (DB, messaging) with realistic dependencies (e.g., Testcontainers) and keep them parallelizable and stable. Avoid one giant “tests everything” suite.

Advanced answer

Deep dive

Expanding on the short answer — what usually matters in practice:

  • Context (tags): testing, monolith, ci, integration-tests
  • Scaling: what scales horizontally vs vertically, where bottlenecks appear.
  • Reliability: retries/circuit breakers/idempotency, observability (logs/metrics/traces).
  • Evolution: keep changes cheap (boundaries, contracts, tests).
  • Explain the "why", not just the "what" (intuition + consequences).
  • Trade-offs: what you gain/lose (time, memory, complexity, risk).
  • Edge cases: empty inputs, large inputs, invalid inputs, concurrency.

Examples

A tiny example (an explanation template):

// Example: discuss trade-offs for "how-do-you-approach-integration-testing-in-a-mon"
function explain() {
  // Start from the core idea:
  // Follow a test pyramid: many fast unit tests, fewer integration tests, and a small number o
}

Common pitfalls

  • Too generic: no concrete trade-offs or examples.
  • Mixing average-case and worst-case (e.g., complexity).
  • Ignoring constraints: memory, concurrency, network/disk costs.

Interview follow-ups

  • When would you choose an alternative and why?
  • What production issues show up and how do you diagnose them?
  • How would you test edge cases?

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