Foundations of testing in Clean Architecture
The carefully structured layers and explicit dependencies in Clean Architecture don’t just make our systems more maintainable, they fundamentally transform how we approach testing. Many teams, faced with complex codebases and unclear boundaries, fall back to end-to-end testing through tools like Selenium or headless browsers. While these tests can provide confidence that critical user workflows function, they’re often slow, brittle, and provide poor feedback when failures occur. Moreover, setting up comprehensive unit and integration tests in such systems can feel overwhelming. Where do you even start when everything is tightly coupled?
Clean Architecture offers a different perspective. Instead of relying primarily on end-to-end tests, we can build confidence in our system through focused, maintainable tests that respect architectural boundaries. Rather than fighting complex dependencies and setup, we find that our architectural...
