orstub

Orstub is a software testing artifact used to substitute for unavailable or remote components during development, testing, and continuous integration. It implements the same interface as the real component but provides deterministic, controllable behavior, enabling tests to run offline or in isolation.

Origin and motivation: In distributed and service-oriented architectures, teams rely on stubs to simulate external services when the real services are unavailable or costly to use in CI pipelines. Orstub extends traditional stubs by offering configurable responses, timing behavior, and optional orchestration logic to model simple interaction patterns without invoking real dependencies.

Characteristics: Orstubs are typically self-contained and portable, easy to instantiate from interface definitions, and scriptable through lightweight configuration. They can simulate latency, configurable error rates, and varied payloads; support both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces; and allow tests to script scenarios using straightforward configuration files or metadata.

Variants: Common variants include fast stubs (minimal overhead), stateful stubs (maintain internal state across calls), and orchestrated stubs (coordinate a sequence of calls to reflect simple workflows). Many toolchains provide templates, data libraries, and hooks to integrate orstubs with test runners and build pipelines.

Usage and limitations: Orstubs are widely used for unit and integration testing, offline development, and CI environments where real services are impractical to use. They help stabilize tests and enable repeatable scenarios but can mask integration issues if overused or kept out of date with evolving interfaces. Regular maintenance and synchronization with real components are recommended.

See also: stubs, mocks, dummy objects, test doubles.