Designing a Robust Integration Test Suite for Convoy’s Data Plane with TestContainers

As software systems grow in complexity, ensuring their components work cohesively during modifications becomes critical, a challenge addressed through end-to-end integration testing. Convoy, an open-source tool written in Go, facilitates the secure exchange of webhook events at scale, and its reliability is maintained through a robust integration test suite using TestContainers. Initially, Convoy relied on various checks, including Golang Lint and unit tests, which revealed limitations such as a lack of true end-to-end testing and manual database management. To address these, Convoy transitioned to using TestContainers, initially creating separate containers for services like Redis and Postgres, but later adopting a more streamlined approach using Docker Compose, which simplified operations and resolved networking issues. This integration allowed for an efficient and cleaner testing process, enabling the detection of defects and supporting multiple test scenarios, including fan-out events and other ingestion structures. The enhanced testing setup not only mitigated technical debt but also improved reliability, demonstrating the importance of comprehensive end-to-end tests in maintaining the efficiency of cloud-native applications like Convoy.