The question is more about the fundamental understanding of a normal/ideal CI flow and understanding the scope of integration testing in it.
As per my understanding, the basic CI CD flow is
UnitTesting --> IntegrationTesting --> Build Artifact --> Deploy to Dev/Sandbox or any other subsequent environments.
So unit tetsing and integration testing collectively decide/make sure if the build is stable and ready to be deployed.
But, recently, we had this discussion in my team where we wanted to run integration tests on deployed instances on Dev/Sandbox etc , so as to verify if the application is working fine after deployment.
And the microsoft's article on Build - Deploy - Test workflows suggests that this could be a possible way.
So , my questions are :-
- Are integration tests supposed to test configuration of different environments ?
- Are integration tests supposed to be run before packaging application or deploying the application ?
- If at all, some automated testing is required to test deployed application functioning on all environments ? If not integration tests then what could be alternative solutions