Dear SAP Cloud Integration, how do I unit test?

[engswee]

Stop testing your interfaces

Fellow Mentor michal.krawczyk2 hosted networking sessions Stop testing your interface scenarios – you’re not doing it anyway right at TechEd last year to discuss about interface testing. The premise is that if you are not efficiently testing your interfaces (preferably using some form of automation), why bother?!

As a matter of fact, both Michal and daniel.graversen have separately developed tools can that aid with automated interface testing. However, it's a pity that this is only gaining popularity now when we are near the end of the shelf life of PI/PRO.

 

New wine in old wineskins

SAP Cloud Platform Integration is no doubt an exciting solution to work on. While there are efforts to ensure that it is gaining some level of feature parity with its older sibling PI, there is also a need to be wary of falling into old patterns of working.

These days, even old time SAP shops are trying to run in an Agile manner. However, if we continue to approach the development in Cloud Integration the same way we did in Process Integration, running Agile is near impossible.

With Cloud Integration still evolving and maturing, there in an opportunity now for SAP to break away from old development practices, and catch up with Gartner Magic Quadrant IPaaS market leaders.

To achieve this, there needs to be a paradigm shift on the different aspects like development, testing, deployment, etc.

 

The case for HCIUnit CPIUnit

If one dare to venture far enough outside the walled garden of SAP, one can discover many an interesting thing.

MuleSoft provides a testing framework named MUnit - some of the features are an integration developer's dream come true.

• Imagine being able to test your integration scenarios locally on your desktop


• Imagine having the capability to script unit tests and automate their testing


• Imagine being able to mock endpoints and test your integration without actual systems


• Imagine having integration with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment that automates the whole build-to-deploy process

 

Keeping SAP relevant

So here is my wishlist as we enter this brave new world of SAP Cloud Platform Integration:-

• Continue investing in Eclipse instead of deprecating it in preference for Web UI (The whole topic of Web UI vs Eclipse deserves its own blog post - "Dear SAP Cloud Integration, Y U No Love Eclipse?" sounds like an apt name for it!)


• Include local integration engine in the Eclipse plugins to enable local testing


• Introduce a unit testing framework


• Enable capability to mock endpoints during unit testing

 

Dare we dream about doing things differently?