Chapter 9. Testing Akka.NET actors

Throughout the book, you’ve seen that the outcome of applying the Reactive Manifesto to application design is a better UX. The services and applications you build should remain responsive even in the face of failure or scalability issues. Your goal is to provide the best possible experience to users and ensure they’re happy when using your applications, but this entails more than maintaining responsiveness. You want them to use the application to its full potential without facing bugs and other issues.

An e-commerce website can experience spikes in traffic that create significant stress on services, possibly leading to failure. You can prepare for increased load to ensure that users are able to make purchases during traffic spikes. But even if you’ve built a system that scales up well, there still may be scenarios that prevent users from making a purchase. For example, users add items to their shopping carts before going through a checkout to complete their purchase, but if there’s a bug in the logic powering the shopping cart service, the process fails, leading to frustration and lost sales.

9.1. Introducing Akka.TestKit

9.2. Unit testing actors

9.3. Integration testing actors

9.4. Testing distributed applications with MultiNode TestKit

9.5. Case study: Testing, test-driven development, unit testing

Summary