Oh my poor business logic • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#151

Post by FuriouslyAdrift » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 1:51 PM UTC

thenobsta wrote: post #114

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked disaster recover and continuity, we had to map every business process. We would make one map from the info the managers told us and one map of the actual processes by talking to every single employee involved. We frequently found critical processes no manager knew about and also that some random secretary was the focal point for entire departments (mundane processes no one else wanted)

Whoa, this is unsurprising, but surprising/unfortunate. I'd love to read a tutorial of how mapping every business process is done in practice. Do you have any pointers?

You start with any documentation they already have (usually done for insurance or legal reasons) and start mapping much in the same way you would map data flow in a program.

Other sources are any existing ERP or other business process system.

Paperwork of any kind (invoices, quotes, POs, accounting) can also be used.

Even if a business thinks they are a flat org and have few processes, I guarantee there are ad hoc managers/leaders along with shadow processes.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#152

Post by rednafi » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

javier_e06 wrote: post #109

A business is a group of ferrets. Other than eating and inviting mischief, no much logic there.

I fed this to midjourney and it gave me a few great illustrations :p

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#153

Post by Aqueous » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 11:13 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #129

Aqueous wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of few better investments than to have a reliable suite of end-to-end tests running as part of your merge pipeline even if they're difficult to set up. Sleep quality improves once you have this in place. Your tests don't have to be brittle or flaky. If your tests are brittle it is definitely a good investment to fix whatever's causing the brittleness rather than accept it as a fact of life. Having the tes…

Distributed systems automatically bring challenges that makes it very hard to create reliable test suites. You can reduce the flakey-ness, but I don't think you can ever completely eliminate it. Beyond that, you haven't addressed the fact that a comprehensive end-to-end test suite in a complex system is really, really slow.

Just to clarify, I'm talking about integration testing the service itself - posting a payload, saving to the database, producing messages to a mock queue, etc. Test the entire service in isolation from other services and validate that it is behaving correctly. Not end to end across services. You should be mocking out all service dependencies and testing against the contracts for those systems.

Our API tests run flawlessly every time because they write against an isolated database with well-defined endpoint and messaging contracts. They also execute all remote operations against a mock API that conforms to those contracts. This is perfectly achievable.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#154

Post by Tainnor » Sun, Nov 12, 2023, 7:42 PM UTC

Aqueous wrote: post #153

Tainnor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed systems automatically bring challenges that makes it very hard to create reliable test suites. You can reduce the flakey-ness, but I don't think you can ever completely eliminate it. Beyond that, you haven't addressed the fact that a comprehensive end-to-end test suite in a complex system is really, really slow.

Just to clarify, I'm talking about integration testing the service itself - posting a payload, saving to the database, producing messages to a mock queue, etc. Test the entire service in isolation from other services and validate that it is behaving correctly. Not end to end across services. You should be mocking out all service dependencies and testing against the contracts for those systems. Our API tests run flawl…

I agree that this is achievable but it seems to contradict your original assertion. Mocking out other services doesn't give you the same assurances as end to end testing the whole stack.

To me it's a classic tradeoff: the more you integrate in your tests, the more meaningful they are - but also the harder to write and maintain.