I'm interested in getting some community feedback on the subject of testing your flows. More specifically, have you created a set of tests you can routinely run against your flows to verify they are working? Have you created a test suite outside of Node-RED (eg using mocha or some other test runne…

Thanks for the replies so far. One request - I'm keen to hear about the positive examples of people doing the things I've described, rather than lots of "I don't do that" type replies :slight_smile:

I'm similar to Colin. Though I also try to keep segments of flows independent of each other in order to minimise the impact of later changes. With the home automation flows, I may go months without making any changes so it is unlikely that I would remember complex interactions. For testing custom n…

So far I’m just utilising the same techniques I’d use professionally: run it through with sample inputs for all situations. Different testing strategies work for that, but Modified Condition/Decision Coverage stays a favourite for the switch nodes. A pairwise data combination test if the situation r…

[image] knolleary: I'm keen to hear about the positive examples A simple thing I do that has not been mentioned is to insert lots of node.warn statements into function nodes. These not only display the values of variables (including context) that I want to track, they can be made conditional …

[image] drmibell: I hope that @knolleary will follow up by asking if there are features that could added to NR to improve testing/debugging At some point we will, but that is not the purpose of this thread. We want to capture what people are doing today so we can try to document today's best …

I guessed that, so I refrained...

Same as Colin (sorry Nick). NR is good at communicating with IoT stuff. Developing testing scenarios would involve taking into account communication problems, time outs, different messages sent from different sources at different times, etc. This is easily done with manually activated inject nodes. …

I always try to think what if... the output from a sensor sends an error code instead of a data reading. What if the response to a http request results is no response or malformed formatting. etc, etc. ...then how would my flow cope? can it handle the abnormality or would it cause bigger issues? T…

I try to test my flows by running them in a "simulation mode", i.e. injecting same type of data as it later will receive live. For specific needs, specifically for flows built for "long term" data collection, I have also configured the logic as a simulator allowing me to test the logic with data inj…

The flow is the test for me. I have a need for a flow. There is expected input and output. I setup my flows to filter for the expected input only and block anything else that might come in, I see this as a catch-all without looking at it (although initially most input-data is known). If something f…

❓ Discussion: How do you test your flows?

General

gmag11 20 January 2020 17:34 22

I use inject nodes with different test messages an debug node to check output. I know it's not a real test.
I did not know about assert node. I'll have a look.
Anyway, it would very nice to get some indications on best practises to do testing on NodeRed.

1 Like

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❓ Discussion: How do you test your flows?

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