TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo)

The level of difficulty in testing the vanilla BW process is very low, as a developer can test it from a local desktop. Or we can create the easily deployable EARs to test.

Current BW5 IDE has a Tester builtin, which is very easy/stable for small projects, but gets less stable/simple for a larger messages.

Testing is fairly effective and not difficult

The integrated tester in the BW Designer IDE is very easy and intuitive to use. The ability to save input data for test cases makes it possible to re-use the data between testing cycles. All this is possible only in the IDE and cannot be automated, something which is provided in BW6.

This is one area i feel Tibco BW needs to improve upon. Although the TIBCO BW provides testing window in the designer, more features and options might need to be provided for unit testing and integration testing purpose. The present tools are very clumsy to test for a developer unless he is very accustomed to it.

Testing Integration Flows did pose some challenges, but when we started using CA DevTest (formerly ITKO Lisa), we overcame the complexity and hidden problems very quickly. We are in the process of automating much of this integration testing as a part of CI/CD.

TIBCO BW comes with a debugger that facilitates easy testing of processes within the editor. During debugging, the developer can step into Processes and associated sub-process/es and their components. And for each step, the developer can check the real-time value of input and output fields. Moreover, the debugger allows the developer to save test data onto a file and, conversely, load the same during testing.

It is very hard, if not impossible, to test TIBCO products, in the sense of unit testing. I know there are some tools for this, but we usually cannot run these tests.

For integration testing, we also need to find ways to do integration testing using tools like soapui or make our own tools. This is a big hole.

It provides an inbuilt tester inside the tool which makes the unit testing very easy. It also provides the breakpoints with which we can halt the processing at any point and debug the issue.The best part is we can see the input and output data of each palette which makes the debugging easier. I love inspector activity which basically writes the complete processing data inside a file and you can see the data and debug the issue more efficiently.

When compared to other programming languages, sometimes it is hard to achieve visibility in testing as TIBCO BusinessWorks is seen as a black box by other teams. Also, it is hard to define the scope for TIBCO BusinessWorks testing for non-BW functional testers. So we have to involve pretty closely in testing.

Currently we use out-of-the-box designer testing features to do the unit test by the developers. Sometimes, we use SOAP UI for the system testing purpose as well. And in integration testing and performance testing, LISA is being used along with other testing software. I can't determine if there is any testing tool with which BW can't be tested.

It's pretty simple, easy and straight forward method of testing using designer.

I don't think it's difficult to test the flows as I already answered in my previous question, debugging is easy in BusinessWorks

Within BusinessWorks, a piece of code is developed within a process definition. A project usually contains multiple process definitions, each containing specific pieces of an implementation. For purposes of re-use, any of these process definitions maybe called within another process definition as well if that particular "method" is required within another operation. This feature also makes it really easy to test one's processes by means of creating a test process and calling the actual process definitions from within the test process. By following this approach, one can achieve almost 100% code coverage from an integration testing perspective. Other tools also provide integration testing but requires more configuration in order to execute particular test cases. TIBCO BusinessWorks supports the Test driven development approach out of the box.

It is simply to develop process unit tests but then, it must find a way to call these processes in an autonomous way. For this we use Maven.