I need to write some integration tests for my Spring application using Flowable. My tests must include the application BPMN workflow logic.
My question is - should I start and deploy normal Flowable engine during my tests as I do in the application? In official documentation I see some Flowable classes prepared for unit testing but nothing for integration.
Won't starting real Flowable engine cause performance issues during running IT? I'm afraid that they will take long time if I will need to run this with every test separately. How do you deal with this in your applications?
If you ask me, then you should definitely start and deploy a normal Flowable engine during your tests. The link you pasted from the documentation is the exact way how you can do the test. Keep in mind that you can use your own configuration, you don't need a special Spring configuration for the testing.
Starting the real Flowable engines won't cause any performance issues during your testing. All tests in the Flowable repository are actually tests that create and destroy an engine within a single test and that is quite fast. In your case it would be even faster as you won't be starting the engine for each test (the Spring application context is cached between tests). I also have to note that even if you start the engine for each test the time would be negligible as booting the engine is quite fast.
Keep in mind that other components from your Spring application might slow down the start of the tests.
As a reference in the flowable-spring module there are 76 tests in 28 test classes, where each test class has it's own Spring configuration, which means there is no Spring context reuse between tests. All those tests take 55s on my local machine. For those tests you need to keep into consideration that some tests are testing some complex scenarios where the async executors are running and are taking more time than usually. You most probably won't have such tests. With those specific tests disabled (3 from 3 test classes) the test time goes down to 28s.
NB: If you are not using @Deployment or you are relying on the auto deploy feature from Flowable then make sure that you are deleting the instances that you are creating in your tests. This would make sure that data from one test does not affect data from another test.