Skip to main content

Approval Testing

What is Approval Testing?​

An approval test is a comparison in the results of a product.

Does the overall functionality of my product do what I actually expect. Close(ish) to an integration or system test but does not talk to other systems. It is a data/text based test.

How to use it?​

Example taken from https://approvaltests.com/

In normal unit testing, you say assertEquals(5, person.getAge()). Approvals allow you to do this when the thing that you want to assert is no longer a primitive but a complex object. For example, you can say, Approvals.verify(person).

  1. Write tests that generate text output for validation
  2. Use approval testing tools to compare the last version of the data against the new version of the data.
  3. Accept or deny the changes now that you know that the complex object you're generating matches the expectations.

Where I learnt this​

I learnt about this from the Arrested Devops Podcast episode for November 2021 with Emily Bache who is a technical agile coach.

Resources​

https://approvaltests.com/ https://github.com/texttest/texttest